
Qass. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE HARVARD CLASSICS 

EDITED BY CHARLES W ELIOT LLD 



ESSAYS 

AND 

ENGLISH TRAITS 

BY 

R W EMERSON 
it 

WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES 
AND ILLUSTRATIONS 



3 



v *** Bm * m m i i *x* * f 




P F COLLIER & SON 
NEW YORK 




Copyright, 1909 
By P. F. Collier & Son 



T$ 



- 



h%t 



\ 



AJy^'/ftf 



Cla.fA, 214 47 8 2 
JUL 28 1909 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

[E American Scholar 5 



r Ad ress ... 25 

ln tids Reformer 45 

lf-rpliance . 63 

'mpensation 89 

liendship . . io9 

2ROISM 125 

ie Over-soul 137 

RCLEiJ 155 

ie Poet 167 

iaracter .......... 191 

anners . . . . . . . . . . . 207 

[PTS 229 

ATU.^E . . . • .233 

3LI^ CS 249 

ew England Reformers 263 

r ORS up 283 

eaui^y . 307 



(lj A HCV 






Ac 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Mass., on M 
25, 1803, the son of a prominent Unitarian minister. He u 
educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard Collei 
from which he graduated at eighteen. On leaving college 
ught school for some time, and in 1825 returned to Cambrid 
study divinity. The next year he began to preach; and 
829 he married Ellen Tucker, and was chosen colleague to t 
Uv. Henry Ware, minister of the historic church in Hanov 
treet, Boston. So far things seemed to be going well with hfa 
I it in 1831 his wife died, and in the next year scruples abo 
a ministering the Lord's Supper led him to give up his churc 
I, sadness and poor health he set out in December on his fir 
vi It to Europe, passing through Italy, Switzerland, and France 
to Britain, and visiting Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and, 
most important of all, Carlyle, with whom he laid the foundation 
of a life-long friendship. On his return to America he took up 
lecturing, and he continued for nearly forty years to use this 
form of expression for his ideas on religion, politics, literature, 
and philosophy. In 1835 he bought a house in Concord, and 
took there his second wife, Lidian Jackson. The history of the 
fCZt of his life is uneventful, as far as external incident is con- 
cerned. He traveled frequently giving lectures; took part in 
founding in 1840 the "Dial" and in 1857 the "Atlantic Monthly," 
to both of which he contributed freely, and the former of which 
he edited for a short time; introduced the writings of Carlyle 
to America, and published a succession of volumes of essays, 
addresses, and poems. He made two more visits to Europe, and 
on the earlier delivered lectures in the principal towns of Eng- 
land and Scotland. He died at Concord on April 27, 1882, after 
a few years of failing memory, during which his public activities 
were necessarily greatly reduced. 

At the time of Emerson's death, he was recognised as the 
foremost writer and thinker of his country ; but this recognition 
had come only gradually. The candor and the vigor of his 
thinking had led him often to champion unpopular causes, and 
during his earlier years of authorship his departures from Uni- 
tarian orthodoxy were viewed with hostility and alarm. In the 

3 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

Ibolitionist movement also he took a prominent part, zvhia 
ought him the distinction of being mobbed in Boston ant 
imbridge. In these and other controversies, however, while 

■ ink in his opinions, and eloquent and vigorous in his expres- 
on of them, he showed a remarkable quality of tact ana 
asonableness, which prevented the opposition to him from 
king the acutely personal turn which it assumed in relatio' \ 
l some of his associates, and which preserved to him a rai 1 

gnity. 

Recognition of his eminence has not been confined to /J 
mntrymen. Carlyle in Britain and Hermann Grimm in G^ 
any were only leaders of a large body of admirers in EurcS 
id it may be safely said that no American has exerted m 7 m J 
Id World an intellectual influence comparable to thatd[ f 



merson. 

The spirit and ideas which constitute the essence of his tM f- 
ing are fully expressed in the essays contained in this voium\e. 
The writings here produced belong to the earlier half of his 
literary activity; but it may fairly be said that by i860 Emerson 
had put forth all his important fundamental ideas, the later utter- 
ances consisting largely of restatements and applications of 
these. Thanks to the singular beauty and condensation of his 
style, it is thus possible to obtain from this one volume a com- 
plete view of the philosophy of the greatest of Ame^cm 
thinkers. 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 



AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA 
SOCIETY, AT CAMBRIDGE, AUGUST 31, 1837 

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: I greet 
you on the recommencement of our literary year. 
Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not 
enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or 
skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like 
the ancient Greeks ; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the 
Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our 
contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far 
our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of 
the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters 
any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestruc- 
tible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it 
ought to be, and will be, something else; when the slug- 
gard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron 
lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with 
something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. 
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learn- 
ing of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that 
around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the 
sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, 
that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can 
doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the 
star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our 
zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star 
for a thousand years? 

In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage, but the 
nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, — - 
the American Scholar. Year by year we come up hither 
(5) a hc v 



6 RALPH WA^O EMERSON 

to read one more chapter o -^ his biography. Let us inquire 
what light new clays and ev? ^s have thrown on his character 
and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables which, out of an unknown 
antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in 
the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more 
helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, 
the better to answer its end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; 
that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only 
partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take 
the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a 
farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is 
priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. 
In the divided or social state these functions are parcelled 
out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the 
joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable im- 
plies that the individual, to possess himself, must some- 
times return from his own labor to embrace all the other 
laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain 
of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been 
so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled 
into drops and cannot be gathered. The state of society 
is one in which the members have suffered amputation 
from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters 
— a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never 
a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many 
things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to 
gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity 
of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing 
beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the 
farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth 
to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the 
soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the 
attorney, a statute-book ; the mechanic, a machine ; the sailor, 
a rope of a ship. 

In this distribution of functions the scholar is the del- 
egated intellect. In the right state, he is Man Thinking. In 
the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends 



THE AMEIT ' i SCHOLAR 7 

to become a mere thinker, i II worse, the parrot of 

other men's thinking. 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his 
office is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, 
all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the 
future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do 
not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, 
is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old 
oracle said, " All things have two handles : beware of the 
wrong one." In life, too often the scholar errs with man- 
kind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, 
and consider him in reference to the main influences he 
receives. 

I. The first in time and the first in importance of the 
influences upon the mind is that of Nature. Every day, the 
sun ; and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds 
blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, 
conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of 
all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle 
its value in his mind. What is Nature to him? There is 
never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable 
continuity of this web of God, but always circular power re- 
turning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, 
whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, 
so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on 
system shooting like rays upward, downward, without centre, 
without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, 
Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. 
Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is in- 
dividual, stands by itself. By and by it finds how to join two 
things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three 
thousand ; and so tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, 
it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, dis- 
covering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and 
remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It 
presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been 
a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what 
is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not 
chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a 



8 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that 
geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the 
measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions 
and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is 
nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most re- 
mote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refrac- 
tory fact; one after another reduces all strange constitutions, 
all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for- 
ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts 
of nature, by insight. 

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome 
of day, is suggested that he and it proceed from one root ; one 
is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in 
every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul 
of his soul? A thought too bold, a dream too wild. Yet 
when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more 
earthly natures, when he has learned to worship the soul, and 
to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only 
the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward 
to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. 
He shall see that Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering 
to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty 
is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his 
own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of 
his attainments. So much of Nature as he is ignorant of, 
so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in 
fine, the ancient precept, " Know thyself," and the modern 
precept, " Study Nature," become at last one maxim. 

II. The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar 
is the mind of the Past — in whatever form, whether of liter- 
ature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books 
are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps 
we shall get at the truth — learn the amount of this influence 
more conveniently — by considering their value alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age 
received into him the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave 
it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. 
It came into him life ; it went out from him truth. It came 
to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 9 

thoughts. It came to him business ; it went from him poetry. 
It was dead fact; now it is quick thought. It can stand and 
it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. 
Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it 
issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had 
gone of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the 
completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and im- 
perishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. 
As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so 
neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the 
local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure 
thought that shall be as efficient in all respects to a remote 
posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. 
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, 
each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an 
older period will not fit this. 

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which 
attaches to the act of creation — the act of thought — is trans- 
ferred to the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a 
divine man : henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer 
was a just and wise spirit : henceforward it is settled, the book 
is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his 
statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious ; the guide is a 
tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, 
slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so 
opened, having once received this book, stands upon it and 
makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. 
Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; 
by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from 
accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. 
Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their 
duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which 
Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and 
Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote 
these books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking we have the bookworm. 
Hence, the book-learned class who value books as such; not 
as related to Nature and the human constitution, but as 
making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. 



10 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the biblio- 
maniacs of all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among 
the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, 
which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to 
inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by 
its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite 
instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is 
the active soul. This every man is entitled to ; this every man 
contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, 
and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and 
utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius ; not the 
privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate 
of every man. In its essence it is progressive. The book, 
the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, 
stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say 
they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look 
backward and not forward. But genius looks forward; the 
eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead; 
man hopes ; genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the 
man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ; cinders 
and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are 
creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative 
words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no 
custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the 
mind's own sense of good and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it 
receive from another mind its truth, though it were in tor- 
rents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self- 
recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always 
sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The liter- 
ature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic 
poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be 
sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued 
by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. 
When we can read God directly, the hour is too precious to 
be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But 
when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — 
when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, — 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 11 

we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, 
to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. 
We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, 
" A fig-tree, looking on a fig-tree, becometh fruitful." 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive 
from the best books. They impress us with the conviction 
that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the 
verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Mar- 
veil, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleasure, 
I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of 
all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with 
the joy of our surprise when this poet, who lived in some past 
world two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies 
close to my own soul,, that which I also had wellnigh thought 
and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philo- 
sophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should sup- 
pose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls 
that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their 
future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up 
food before death for the young grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exag- 
geration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know 
that as the human body can be nourished on any food, though 
it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind 
can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men 
have existed who had almost no other information than by 
the printed page, I only would say, that it needs a strong 
head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read 
well. As the proverb says, " He that would bring home the 
wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the 
Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative 
writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, 
the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with 
manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and 
the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then 
see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision 
is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its 
record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The dis- 
cerning will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least 
part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the 



12 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and 
Shakspeare's. 

Of course, there is a portion -of reading quite indispensable 
to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by 
laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their in- 
dispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only 
highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; 
when they gather from far every ray of various genius to 
their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the 
hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are 
natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. 
Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, 
can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. 
Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their 
public importance, whilst they grow richer every year. 

III. There goes in the world a notion that the scholar 
should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any 
handiwork or public labor, as a pen-knife for an axe. The 
so-called "practical men " sneer at speculative men, as if, 
because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I 
have heard it said that the clergy — who are always, more 
universally than any other class, the scholars of their day — 
are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous con- 
versation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and 
diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; 
and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far 
as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. 
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. 
Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can 
never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the 
eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. 
Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without 
the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition 
through which it passes from the unconscious to the con- 
scious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. 
Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and 
whose not. 

The world — this shadow of the soul, or other me — lies 
wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 13 

thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run 
eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of 
those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and 
to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss 
be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its 
fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. 
So much only of life as I know by experience, so much 
of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so 
far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not 
see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and 
his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is 
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, ex- 
asperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. 
The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action passed 
by, as a loss of power. 

It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds 
her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which 
experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf 
is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward 
at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth are 
now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair 
pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, — with 
the business which we now have in hand. On this we are 
quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate 
through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the 
feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed 
is yet a part of life, — remains for a time immersed in our 
unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches 
itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought 
of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the cor- 
ruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object 
of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Ob- 
serve, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its 
grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. 
But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing un- 
furls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is 
there no fact, no event, in our private history which shall 
not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and 
astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. 



14 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of 
boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and 
berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole 
sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and 
party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar 
and sing. 

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit 
actions has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut 
myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into 
a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine ; nor trust the revenue 
of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much 
like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carv- 
ing shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen for 
all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, 
and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their 
pine-trees. Authors we have in numbers who have written 
out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, 
sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the 
prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their mer- 
chantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would "be 
covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well 
spent in country labors; in town, in the insight into trades 
and manufactures : in frank intercourse with many men and 
women ; in science ; in art, — to the one end of mastering in all 
their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody 
our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how 
much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splen- 
dor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from 
whence we get tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of 
to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and 
books only copy the language which the field and the work- 
yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of books, and better 
than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle 
of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring 
and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb 
and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; 
and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every 
fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, — these 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 15 

" fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called 
them, are the law of Nature because they are the law of 
spirit. 

The mind now thinks, now acts; and each fit reproduces 
the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, 
when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no 
longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, — he has 
always the resource to live. Character is higher than in- 
tellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the func- 
tionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul 
will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he 
lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still 
fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a 
total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur 
of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection 
cheer his lowly roof. Those " far from fame," who dwell 
and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in 
the doings and passages of the day better than it can be 
measured by any public and designed display. Time shall 
teach him that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. 
Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened 
from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in 
strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education 
have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to 
destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled 
savage nature, out of terrible Druids and berserkirs, come 
at last Alfred and Shakspeare. 

I hear, therefore, with joy whatever is beginning to be 
said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. 
There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as 
well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere wel- 
come ; always we are invited to work ; only be this limitation 
observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity 
sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes 
of action. 

I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by 
Nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say some- 
what of his duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all 



16 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to 
cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts 
amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and 
unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in 
their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the 
praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, 
honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, catalogu- 
ing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which 
as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and 
months, sometimes, for a few facts ; correcting still his old 
records, — must relinquish display and immediate fame. In 
the long period of his preparation he must betray often an 
ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the 
disdain of the able, who shoulder him aside. Long he must 
stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. 
Worse yet, he must accept — how often ! — poverty and soli- 
tude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, 
accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, 
he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the 
self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty 
and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines 
in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the 
state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to 
society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss 
and scorn, what off-set? He is to find consolation in exer- 
cising the highest functions of human nature. He is one 
who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes 
and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the 
world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the 
vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by 
preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biog- 
raphies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. 
Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, 
in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the 
world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. And 
whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat 
pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, — this 
he shall hear and promulgate. 

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all con- 
fidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 17 

and he only knows the world. The world of any mo- 
ment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some 
fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or 
man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the 
other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. 
The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest 
thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the con- 
troversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a 
popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth 
affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, 
in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add obser- 
vation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; 
and bide his own time, — happy enough if he can satisfy him- 
self alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Suc- 
cess treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure 
that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He 
then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own 
mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He 
learns that he who has mastered any law in his private 
thoughts is master to that extent of all men whose language 
he speaks, and of all into whose language his own 
can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remem- 
bering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is 
found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities 
find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the 
fitness of his frank confessions, — his want of knowledge of 
the persons he addresses, — until he finds that he is the com- 
plement of his hearers; that they drink his words because 
he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives 
into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he 
finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally 
true. The people delight in it ; the better part of every man 
feels, This is my music; this is myself. 

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free 
should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the 
definition of freedom, " without any hindrance that does not 
arise out of his own constitution." Brave; for fear is a 
thing which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. 
Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him 
if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the 



18 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

presumption that, like children and women, his is a protected 
class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of 
his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his 
head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into 
microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep 
his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is 
the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let 
him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its 
origin, — see the whelping of this lion, which lies no great 
way back; he will then find in himself a perfect compre- 
hension of its nature and extent; he will have made his 
hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, 
and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through 
its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, 
what overgrown error you behold, is there only by suffer- 
ance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have 
already dealt it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed — we the trustless. It is a mis- 
chievous notion that we are come late into Nature; that the 
world was finished a long time ago. As the world was 
plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much 
of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, 
it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in 
proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firma- 
ment flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not 
he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my 
state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give 
the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, 
and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying 
the matter, that this thing which they do is the apple which 
the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting 
nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great 
thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the 
table. Linnaeus makes botany the most alluring of studies, 
and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy,, 
chemistry ; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who 
works in it with serenity and great aims. The unst^le^ 
estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with 
a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon. 

For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fath- 



* 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 19 

omed, darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry 
with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. 
But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in ad- 
verting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has 
been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost 
the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men 
are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world 
of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called " the mass " 
and " the hercfrin a century, in a millennium, one or two 
men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right 
state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the 
poet their own green and crude being, — ripened; yes, and 
are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. 
What a testimony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to 
the demands of his own nature by the poor clansman, the 
poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The 
poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral 
capacity for their acquiescence in a political and social in- 
feriority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the 
path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to 
that common nature which it is the dearest desire df all to 
see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great 
man's light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast 
the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the 
shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of 
blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews com- 
bat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or 
power; and power because it is as good as money, — the 
" spoils," so called, " of office." And why not? for they aspire 
to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream 
is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, 
and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and 
desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual 
domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise 
of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of 
a man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground. 
The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious mon- 
archy, — more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene 
in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. 



20 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular 
natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each 
actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one 
day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued 
more than the apple of the eye we have quite exhausted. 
What is that but saying that we have come up with the 
point of view which the universal mind took through the 
eyes of one scribe ; we have been that man, and have passed 
on. First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and, wax- 
ing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more 
abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us 
ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who 
shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, un- 
boundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now 
out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily ; and now 
out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and 
vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a 
thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. 

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of 
the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have 
to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country. 

Historically there is thought to be a difference in the 
ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there 
are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Ro- 
mantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With 
the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity 
of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell 
on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual 
passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, 
romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that 
a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough 
traced. 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must 
that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are em- 
barrassed with second thoughts; we can not enjoy anything 
for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we 
are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is in- 
fected with Hamlet's unhappiness, — 

" Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 21 

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. 
Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee 
Nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the 
discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of 
the fact that they find themselves not in the state of mind 
of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a 
boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can 
swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, 
is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new 
stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the 
energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; when 
the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the 
rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, 
is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. 

I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the com- 
ing days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, 
through philosophy and science, through church and state. 

One of these signs is the fact that the same movement 
which affected the elevation of what was called the lowest 
class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as 
benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the 
near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That 
which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who 
were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long jour- 
neys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than 
all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of 
the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of house- 
hold life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. 
It is a sign, is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities 
are made active, when currents of warm life run into the 
hands and feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the 
romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek 
art or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I 
explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give 
me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and 
future worlds. What would we really know the meaning 
of? The meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the ballad 
in the street, the news of the boat, the glance of the eye, the 
form and the gait of the body, — show me the ultimate 
reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of 

B HCV 



22 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, 
in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see 
every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it in- 
stantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the 
ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates 
and poets sing; — and the world lies no longer a dull miscel- 
lany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no 
trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates 
the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench. 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, 
Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and 
Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with 
various success. In contrast with their writing, the style 
of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. 
This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that 
things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things 
remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small 
ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of 
the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, 
in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has 
shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients. 

There is one man of genius who has done much for this 
philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been 
rightly estimated; I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most 
imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a math- 
ematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical 
Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an 
attempt, of course, must have difficulty which no genius 
could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection be- 
tween nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced 
the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, 
tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover 
over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the 
mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material 
forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of insanity, 
of beasts, of unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous 
political movement, is the new importance given to the 
single person. Everything that tends to insulate the in- 
dividual — to surround him with barriers of natural respect, 



THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 23 

so that each man shall feel the world is his and man shall 
treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state — 
tends to true union as well as greatness. " I learned," said 
the melancholy Pestalozzi, " that no man in God's wide 
earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help 
must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man 
who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, 
all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. 
He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one les- 
son more than another which should pierce his ear, it is, 
The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law 
of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap 
ascends ; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason ; it is for 
you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and 
Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man 
belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, 
to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the 
courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American free- 
man is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public 
and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. 
The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already 
the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught 
to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for 
any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of 
the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated 
by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, 
find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hin- 
dered from action by the disgust which the principles on which 
business is managed inspire, and turn drudges or die of disgust 
— some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did 
not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now 
crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that 
if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, 
and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. 
Patience, patience; with the shades of all the good and great 
for company ; and for solace, the perspective of your own in- 
finite life ; and for work, the study and the communication 
of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the 
conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace 
in the world not !o be a unit, not to be reckoned one char- 



24 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR 

acter, not to yield that peculiar fruit; which each man was 
created to bear; but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hun- 
dred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we 
belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the 
north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, — please 
God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; 
we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own 
minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for 
pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of 
man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a 
wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the 
first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by 
the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE SENIOR CLASS IN DIVINITY 
COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, SUNDAY EVENING, JULY 1 5, 1838 

IN this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to draw 
the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, 
the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint 
of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the 
breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. 
Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. 
Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their al- 
most spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, 
and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world 
as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson 
dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more 
happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to 
all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the 
old bounty goes forward has not yielded yet one word of 
explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection 
of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide, 
how rich, what invitation from every property it gives to 
every faculty of man ! In its fruitful soils ; in its navigable 
sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests of 
all woods ; in its animals ; in its chemical ingredients ; in the 
powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, — it is 
well worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and 
enjoy it. The planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the 
astronomers, the builders of cities and the captains, history 
delights to honor. 

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which 
traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then 
shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration 
and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks 

25 



26 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never 
to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our 
imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but 
not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, 
so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I 
would admire forever. These works of thought have been 
the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages. 

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears 
to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment 
of virtue. Then he is instructed in what is above him. 
He learns that his being is without bound; that to 
the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies 
in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his 
own, though he has not realized it yet. He ought. He 
knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis 
fails entirely to render account of it. When in innocency, 
or when by intellectual perception, he attains to say : — " I 
love the Right; Truth is beautiful within and without for- 
evermore. Virtue, I am thine; save me; use me; thee will 
I serve, day and night, in great, in small, that I may be not 
virtuous, but virtue ;"■ — then is the end of the creation an- 
swered, and God is well pleased. 

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the 
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this 
homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem 
foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst 
his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, 
muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, 
justice, appetite, man, and God interact. These laws refuse 
to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on 
paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering 
thought; yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in 
each other's actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits 
which are all globed into every virtuous act and thought, — 
in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful 
enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is 
the essence of all religion, let me guide your eye to the pre- 
cise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of some of 
those classes of facts in which this element is conspicuous. 

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 27 

perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute 
themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not 
subject to circumstance. Thus, in the soul of man there 
is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He 
who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does 
a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts 
off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart 
just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the im- 
mortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that 
man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives 
himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. 
A man in the view of absolute goodness adores with total 
humility. Every step so downward is a step upward. The 
man who renounces himself comes to himself. 

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, 
righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up 
facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, 
though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. 
By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing 
good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is 
always known. Thefts never enrich ; alms never impover- 
ish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least ad- 
mixture of a lie — for example, the taint of vanity, the least 
attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance 
— will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and 
all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected further- 
ance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are 
vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there 
do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again 
the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, 
and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. 
The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, 
the vile. Thus of their own volition souls proceed into 
heaven, into hell. 

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime 
creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, 
but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is every- 
where active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the 
pool ; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked 
and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. 



28 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: 
it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is 
so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and 
real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life 
hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, 
which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its 
different applications, just as the ocean receives different 
names on the several shores which it washes. All things 
proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with 
it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the 
whole strength of Nature. In so far as he roves from 
these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; 
his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes 
less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is 
absolute death. 

The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind 
a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and 
which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power 
to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the 
embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlo- 
rine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, 
and the silent song of the stars is it. By it is the universe 
made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought 
may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end 
or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the 
heart gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over 
all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem 
to break out into joy. 

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude 
of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it the soul first 
knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant 
man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and 
hopes to derive advantages from another, by showing the 
fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally 
with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When 
he says, " I ought ; " when love warns him ; when he chooses, 
warned from on high, the good and the great deed, — then 
deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wis- 
dom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his wor- 
ship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 29 

sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, 
love is never outgrown. 

This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and 
successively creates all forms of worship. The principle 
of veneration never dies out. Man fallen into superstition, 
into sensuality, is never quite without the visions of the 
moral sentiment. In like manner all the expressions of this 
sentiment are sacred and permanent in proportion to their 
purity. The expressions of this sentiment affect us more 
than all other compositions. The sentences of the oldest 
time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant. 
This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men 
in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Pales- 
tine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, 
in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to 
Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards 
said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the 
unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is 
not so much written as ploughed into the history of this 
world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion. 

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, 
night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this 
truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, 
namely, it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second 
hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, 
that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, 
I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, 
or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. 
On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the 
presence of degradation. As is the flood, so is the ebb. 
Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake, and the 
things it made, become false and hurtful. Then falls the 
church, the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the 
divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs 
the constitution. Once man was all ; now he is an ap- 
pendage, a nuisance. And because the indwelling Supreme 
Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers 
this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one 
or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with 
fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine 



30 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of 
the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy 
life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the be- 
lief nor in the aspiration of society; but, when suggested, 
seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high 
ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near- 
sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses. 

These general views, which, whilst they are general, none 
will contest, find abundant illustration in the history of 
religion, and especially in the history of the Christian 
church. In that, all of us have had our birth and nurture. 
The truth contained in that, you, my young friends, are now 
setting forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship 
of the civilized world, it has great historical interest for us. 
Of its blessed words, which have been the consolation of 
humanity, you need not that I should speak. I shall en- 
deavor to discharge my duty to you, on this occasion, by 
pointing out two errors in its administration, which daily 
appear more gross from the point of view we have just 
now taken. 

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He 
saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by 
its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in 
it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he esti- 
mated the greatness of man. One man was true to what 
was in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself 
in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of 
his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion: — 
" I am divine. Through me, God acts ; through me, speaks. 
Would you see God, see me ; or, see thee, when thou also 
thinkest as I now think." But what a distortion did his 
doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and 
the following ages ! There is no doctrine of the Reason 
which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The 
understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, 
and said, in the next age : — " This was Jehovah come down 
out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was a man." 
The idioms of his language and the figures of hi% rhetoric 
have usurped the place of his truth ; and churches are not 
built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity be- 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 31 

came a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of 
Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles ; for he felt that man's 
life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew 
that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But 
the word " miracle," as pronounced by Christian churches, 
gives a false impression; it is "monster." It is not one with 
the blowing clover and the falling rain. 

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit 
tenderness at postponing their initial revelations to the 
hour and the man that now is, to the eternal revelation in 
the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that 
the law in us is commanding he would not surfer it to be 
commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he 
declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul 
in history who has appreciated the worth of a man. 

I. In this point of view we become very sensible of the 
first defect of historical Christianity. Historical Christian- 
ity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to 
communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has 
appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an 
exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It 
has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the 
person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites 
every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and 
will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But 
by this Eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence 
and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of 
man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with 
expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, 
but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous 
sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel that the lan- 
guage that describes Christ to Europe and America is not 
the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble 
heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, 
as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or 
Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early cate- 
chetical instruction, and even honesty and self-denial were 
but splendid sins if they did not wear the Christian name. 
One would rather be 

"A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn," 



32 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into 
nature, and finding not names and places, not land and pro- 
fessions, but even virtue, and truth, foreclosed and monopo- 
lized. You shall not be a man even. You shall not own the 
world; you shall not dare, and live after the infinite Law 
that is in you, and in company with the infinite Beauty 
which heaven and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; 
but you must subordinate your nature to Christ's nature, 
you must accept our interpretations, and take his portrait as 
the vulgar draw it. 

That is always best which gives me to myself. The 
sublime is excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey 
thyself. That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That 
which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. 
There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Al- 
ready the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, 
and I shall decease forever. 

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my in- 
tellect, of my strength. They admonish me that the gleams 
which flash across my mind are not mine, but God's; that 
they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly 
vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from 
them, inviting me to resist evil, to subdue the world, and to 
Be. And thus by his holy thoughts Jesus serves us, and 
thus only. To aim to convert a man by miracles is a 
profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, 
is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful 
sentiments. It is true that a great and rich soul, like his, 
falling among the simple, does so preponderate, that, as his 
did, it names the world. The world seems to them to exist 
for him, and they have not yet drunk so deeply of his sense 
as to see that only by coming again to themselves, or to 
God in themselves, can they grow forevermore. It is a low 
benefit to give me something ; it is a high benefit to enable me 
to do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when all 
men will see that the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunt- 
ing, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural 
goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites 
thine and mine to be and to grow. 

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 33 

flagrant to Jesus than to the souls which it profanes. The 
preachers do not see that they make his gospel not glad, and 
shear him of the locks of beauty and the attributes of 
heaven. When I see a majestic Epaminondas or Washing- 
ton; when I see among my contemporaries a true orator, 
an upright judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to the 
melody and fancy of a poem, — I see beauty that is to be 
desired. And so lovely, and with yet more entire consent of 
my human being, sounds in my ear the severe music of the 
bards that have sung of the true God in all ages. Now, do 
not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of the circle 
of this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie 
as they befell, alive and warm, part of human life, and of the 
landscape, and of the cheerful day. 

2. The second defect of the traditionary and limited way 
of using the mind of Christ is a consequence of the first; 
this, namely, that the Moral Nature, that law of laws, 
whose revelations introduce greatness, yea, God himself, 
into the open soul, is not explored as the fountain of the 
established teaching in society. Men have come to speak 
of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, 
as if God were dead. The injury to faith throttles the 
preacher, and the goodliest of institutions becomes an un- 
certain and inarticulate voice. 

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversation with 
the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire and need to impart 
to others the knowledge and love. If utterance is denied, 
the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer 
is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he pub- 
lishes it with solemn joy; sometimes with pencil on canvas; 
sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and 
aisles of granite his soul's worship is builded; sometimes in 
anthems of indefinite music; but clearest and most per- 
manent, in words. 

The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest 
or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe 
the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The 
spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sen- 
sual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can 
give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on 



34 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, 
alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; 
and every man can open his door to these angels, and they 
shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who 
aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion 
guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush. 

To this holy office you propose to devote yourselves. I 
wish you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. 
The office is the first in the world. It is of that reality, that 
it cannot suffer the deduction of any falsehood. And it is 
my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of 
new revelation than now. From the views I have already 
expressed, you will infer the sad conviction, which I share, 
I believe, with numbers, of the universal decay and now 
almost death of faith in society. The soul is not preached. 
The Church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. 
On this occasion any complaisance would be criminal which 
told you, whose hope and commission it is to preach the 
faith of Christ, that the faith of Christ is preached. 

It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all thoughtful 
men against the famine of our churches ; this moaning of 
the heart because it is bereaved of the consolation, the hope, 
the grandeur, that come alone out of the culture of the 
moral nature, — should be heard through the sleep of in- 
dolence and over the din of routine. This great and per- 
petual office of the preacher is not discharged. Preaching 
is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to 
the duties of life. In how many churches, by how many 
prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite 
soul ; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind ; 
that he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where now 
sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody imparadises 
my heart, and so affirms its own origin in heaven? Where 
shall I hear words such as in elder ages drew men to leave 
all and follow, — father and mother, house and land, wife 
and child? Where shall I hear these august laws of moral 
being so pronounced as to fill my ear, and I feel ennobled by 
the offer of my uttermost action and passion? The test of 
the true faith, certainly, should be its power to charm and 
command the soul, as the laws of nature control the activity 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 35 

of the hands, — so commanding that we find pleasure and 
honor in obeying. The faith should blend with the light of 
rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing 
bird, and the breath of flowers. But now the priest's Sab- 
bath has lost the splendor of nature; it is unlovely; we are 
glad when it is done; we can make, we do make, even sitting 
in our pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves. 

Wherever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is 
the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as 
soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite 
and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and 
secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not. I once 
heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go 
to church no more. Men go, thought I, where they are 
wont to go, else had no soul entered the temple in the after- 
noon. A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow- 
storm was real ; the preacher merely spectral ; and the eye 
felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of 
the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the 
snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word in- 
timating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in 
love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If 
he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for 
it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert 
life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in all his 
experience had he yet imported into his doctrine. This 
man had ploughed and planted, and talked, and bought, and 
sold ; he had read books ; he had eaten and drunken ; his 
head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was 
there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he 
had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real 
history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he 
deals out to the people his life, — life passed through the fire 
of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told 
from his sermon what age of the world he fell in; whether 
he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder 
or a pauper ; whether he was a citizen or a countryman ; or 
any other fact of his biography. It seemed strange that 
the people should come to church. It seemed as if their 
houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer 



36 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

this thoughtless clamor. It shows that there is a command- 
ing attraction in the moral sentiment that can lend a faint 
tint of light to dulness and ignorance, coming in its name 
and place. The good hearer is sure he has been touched 
sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and 
some word that can reach it. When he listens to these vain 
words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remem- 
brance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo 
unchallenged. 

I am not ignorant that when we preach unworthily, it is 
not always quite in vain. There is a good ear, in some men, 
that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutri- 
ment. There is poetic truth concealed in all the common- 
places of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly 
spoken, they may be wisely heard; for each is some select 
expression that broke out in a moment of piety from some 
stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency made it remem- 
bered. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church 
are like the zodiac of Denderah, and the astronomical mon- 
uments of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from anything 
now extant in the life and business of the people. They 
mark the height to which the waters once rose. But this 
docility is a check upon the mischief from the good and de- 
vout. In a large portion of the community, the religious 
service gives rise to quite other thoughts and emotions. We 
need not chide the negligent servant. We are struck with 
pity, rather, at the swift retribution of his sloth. Alas for 
the unhappy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and 
not give bread of life ! Everything that befalls, accuses 
him. Would he ask contributions for the missions, foreign 
or domestic? Instantly his face is suffused with shame, to 
propose to his parish that they should send money a hundred 
or a thousand miles, to furnish such poor fare as they have 
at home, and would do well to go the hundred or the thousand 
miles to escape. Would he urge people to a godly way of 
living; and can he ask a fellow-creature to come to Sabbath 
meetings, when he and they all know what is the poor utter- 
most they can hope for therein? Will he invite them pri- 
vately to the Lord's Supper? He dares not. If no heart 
warm this rite, the hollow, dry, creaking formality is too 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 37 

plain, than that he can face a man of wit and energy, and 
put the invitation without terror. In the street, what has 
he to say to the bold village blasphemer? The village 
blasphemer sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the 
minister. 

Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any over- 
sight of the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity 
and strict conscience of numbers of the clergy. What life 
the public worship retains, it owes to the scattered company 
of pious men who minister here and there in the churches, 
and who, sometimes accepting with too great tenderness the 
tenet of the elders, have not accepted from others, but 
from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and 
so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of char- 
acter. Moreoever, the exceptions are not so much to be 
found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours, 
the truer inspirations of all, — nay, in the sincere moments 
of every man. But with whatever exception, it is still true 
that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; 
that it comes out of the memory and not out of the soul; 
that it aims at what is usual and not at what is necessary 
and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the 
power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration 
of the moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are 
the resources of astonishment and power. What a cruel in- 
justice it is to that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which 
alone can make thought dear and rich ; that Law whose fatal 
sureness the astronomical orbits poorly emulate, that it is 
travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted and behowled, 
and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The pulpit in 
losing sight of this Law loses its reason, and gropes after 
it knows not what. And for want of this culture the soul 
of the community is sick and faithless. It wants nothing 
so much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline, to 
make it know itself and the divinity that speaks through 
it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks 
through the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely 
in a thousand years does any man dare to be wise and 
good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his 

kind. 

c HCV 



38 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Certainly there have been periods when, from the in- 
activity of the intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was 
possible in names and persons. The Puritans in England 
and America found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, 
and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their 
austere piety and their longings for civil freedom. But 
their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room. I 
think no man can go with his thoughts about him into one 
of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public 
worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp 
on the affection of the good and the fear of the bad. In the 
country, neighborhoods, half parishes are signing off, — to 
use the local term. It is already beginning to indicate 
character and religion to withdraw from the religious meet- 
ings. I have heard a devout person who prized the Sab- 
bath say in bitterness of heart : — " On Sundays it seems 
wicked to go to church." And the motive that holds the 
best there, is now only a hope and a waiting. What was 
once a mere circumstance, that the best and the worst men 
in the parish, the poor and the rich, the learned and the 
ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as fellows in 
one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, — has come 
to be a paramount motive for going thither. 

My friends, in these two errors I think I find the causes 
of a decaying church and a wasting unbelief. And what 
greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of 
worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the 
temple, to haunt the senate or the market. Literature be- 
comes frivolous. Science is cold. The eye of youth is not 
lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without 
honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do 
not mention them. 

And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these 
desponding days can be done by us ? The remedy is already 
declared in the ground of our complaint of the Church. 
We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the 
soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a 
man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. 
When a man comes, all books are legible, all things trans- 
parent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 39 

wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless 
and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness 
of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is 
past, that the Bible is closed ; the fear of degrading the char- 
acter of Jesus by representing him as a man, — indicate with 
sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the 
office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; 
that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity — a 
faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man — is lost. None 
believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person 
old and departed. Ah me ! no man goeth alone. All men 
go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God 
who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love 
to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their 
soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser 
than the whole world. See how nations and races flit by on 
the sea of time, and leave no ripple to tell where they floated 
or sunk, and one good soul shall make the name of Moses, 
or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster reverend forever. None essay- 
eth the stern ambition to be the Self of the nation and of 
Nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some Chris- 
tian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man. 
Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own senti- 
ment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul's, or 
George Fox's, or Swedenborg's, and you get wide from 
God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as 
now, for centuries, — the chasm yawns to that breadth, that 
men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything 
divine. 

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone ; to refuse 
the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagi- 
nation of men, and dare to love God without mediator or 
veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to 
your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. 
Thank God for these good men, but say, " I also am a man." 
Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms him- 
self to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it 
was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imi- 
tator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself 
of his own beauty, to come short of another man's. 



40 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast be- 
hind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand 
with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, 
authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you, — are not 
bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live 
with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anx- 
ious to visit periodically all families and each family in 
your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men 
or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought 
or virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; 
let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your 
atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, 
and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting 
your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other 
men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying 
slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have 
sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours 
of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up 
into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the 
memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary 
years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls 
wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we 
knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were. Dis- 
charge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, 
you shall be followed with their love as by an angel. 

And to this end let us not aim at common degrees 
of merit. Can we not leave to such as love it the virtue 
that glitters for the commendation of society, and ourselves 
pierce the deep solitudes of absolute ability and worth ? 
We easily come up to the standard of goodness in society. 
Society's praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men 
are content with those easy merits; but the instant effect 
of conversing with God will be to put them away. There 
are persons who are not actors, not speakers, but in- 
fluences; persons too great for fame, for display; who dis- 
dain eloquence ; to whom all we call art and artist seems too 
nearly allied to show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of 
the finite and selfish, and loss of the universal. The orators, 
the poets, the commanders encroach on us only as fair 
women do, by our allowance and homage. Slight them 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 41 

by preoccupation of mind, slight them as you can well afford 
to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel 
that you have right, and that it is in lower places that 
they must shine. They also feel your right; for they with 
you are open to the influx of the all-knowing Spirit, which 
annihilates before its broad noon the little shades and gra- 
dations of intelligence in the compositions we call wiser 
and wisest. 

In such high communion let us study the grand strokes 
of rectitude : a bold benevolence, an independence of friends 
so that not the unjust wishes of those who love us will 
impair our freedom, but we shall resist for truth's sake the 
freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in ad- 
vance; and — what is the highest form in which we know 
this beautiful element — a certain solidity of merit, that has 
nothing to do with opinion, and which is so essentially and 
manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted that the 
right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and 
nobody thinks of commending it. You would compliment a 
coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel. 
The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in 
the world is the highest applause. Such souls, when they 
appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the perpetual 
reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs not praise their 
courage, — they are the heart and soul of nature. Oh my 
friends, there are resources in us on which we have not 
drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a 
threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and para- 
lyzes the majority — demanding not the faculties of prudence 
and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness 
of sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as a bride. Na- 
poleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the 
battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began 
to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combina- 
tion, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in 
rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which 
put sympathy out of question, and the angel is shown. But 
these are heights that we can scarce remember and look up 
to, without contrition and shame. Let us thank God that 
such things exist. 



42 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smoul- 
dering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the 
Church that now is are manifest. The question returns, 
what shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and 
establish a Cultus with new rites and forms seem to me in 
vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its 
own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold 
as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess 
of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and filigree, and ending to- 
morrow in madness, and murder. Rather let the breath 
of new life be breathed by you through the forms already 
existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall 
become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, 
first, Soul, and second, Soul, and evermore, Soul. A whole 
popedom of forms one pulsation of virtue can uplift and 
vivify. 

Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us: 
first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world; whose 
light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, 
into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and everywhere 
suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let 
it stand forevermdre a temple, which new love, new faith, 
new sight shall restore to more than its first splendor to 
mankind. And secondly, the institution of preaching, — the 
speech of man to men, — essentially the most flexible of all 
organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, 
in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses,, in fields, wherever 
the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, you 
spoke the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, 
and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new 
hope and new revelation? 

I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which 
ravished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of 
those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all 
time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek 
Scriptures contain immortal sentences that have been bread 
of life to millions. But they have no epical integrity; are 
fragmentary ; are not shown in their order to the intellect. 
I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those 
shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall 



ADDRESS TO DIVINITY STUDENTS 43 

see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to 
be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law 
of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the 
Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, 
and with Joy. 



MAN THE REFORMER 

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MECHANICS APPRENTICES' 
LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 184I 

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: I wish to 
offer to your consideration some thoughts on the par- 
ticular and general relations of man as a reformer. 
I shall assume that the aim of each young man in this as- 
sociation is the very highest that belongs to a rational mind. 
Let it be granted, that our life, as we lead it, is common 
and mean ; that some of those offices and functions for which 
we were mainly created are grown so rare in society, that 
the memory of them is only kept alive in old books and in 
dim traditions; that prophets and poets, that beautiful 
and perfect men, we are not now, no, nor have ever seen 
such; that some sources of human instruction are almost un- 
named and unknown among us; that the community in 
which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man 
should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination, and his 
daily walk elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world. 
Grant all this, we must, yet I suppose none of my au- 
ditors will deny that we ought to seek to establish ourselves 
in such disciplines and courses as will deserve that guid- 
ance and clearer communication with the spiritual nature. 
And, further, I will not dissemble my hope that each person 
whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil 
customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place 
a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not con- 
tent to slip along through the world like a footman or a 
spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many 
knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man, who must find 
or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, 

45 



46 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all 
who follow him to go in honor and with benefit. 

In the history of the world the doctrine of reform had 
never such scope as at the present hour. Lutherans, Hern- 
hutters, Jesuits, Monks, Quakers, Knox, Wesley, Sweden- 
borg, Bentham, in their accusations of society, all respected 
something, — Church or State, literature or history, domestic 
usages, the market town, the dinner table, coined money. 
But now all these and all things else hear the trumpet, 
and must rush to judgment, — Christianity, the laws, com- 
merce, schools, the farm, the laboratory ; and not a kingdom, 
town, statute, rite, calling, man, or woman, but is threatened 
by the new spirit. 

What if some of the objections whereby our institutions 
are assailed are extreme and speculative, and the reformers 
tend to idealism: that only shows the extravagance of the 
abuses which have driven the mind into the opposite ex- 
treme. It is when your facts and persons grow unreal and 
fantastic by too much falsehood, that the scholar flies for 
refuge to the world of ideas, and aims to recruit and replenish 
Nature from that source. Let ideas establish their legit- 
imate sway again in society, let life be fair and poetic, and 
the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens and philanthropists. 

It will afford no security from the new ideas that the old 
nations, the laws of centuries, the property and institutions 
of a hundred cities, are built on other foundations. The 
demon of reform has a secret door into the heart of every 
lawmaker, of every inhabitant of every city. The fact that 
a new thought and hope have dawned in your breast, should 
apprise you that in the same hour a new light broke in upon 
a thousand private hearts. That secret which you would 
fain keep, — as soon as you go abroad, lo ! there is one stand- 
ing on the door-step to tell you the same. There is not 
the most bronzed and sharpened money-catcher who does not, 
to your consternation, almost quail and shake the moment 
he hears a question prompted by the new ideas. We thought 
he had some semblance of ground to stand upon, that such 
as he at least would die hard; but he trembles and flees. 
Then the scholar says : — " Cities and coaches shall never im- 
pose on me again; for, behold, every solitary dream of mine 



MAN THE REFORMER 47 

is rushing to fulfilment. That fancy I had, and hesitated to 
utter because you would laugh, — the broker, the attorney, 
the market-man, are saying the same thing. Had I waited 
a day longer to speak, I had been too late. Behold, State 
Street thinks, and Wall Street doubts, and begins to proph- 
esy ! " 

It cannot be wondered at that this general inquest into 
abuses should arise in the bosom of society, when one con- 
siders the practical impediments that stand in the way of vir- 
tuous young men. The young man, on entering life, finds the 
way to lucrative employments blocked with abuses. The 
ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and 
supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. 
The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for 
a man, or less genial to his faculties, but these are now in 
their general course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses 
at which all connive, that it requires more vigor and re- 
sources than can be expected of every young man to right 
himself in them; he is lost in them; he cannot move hand or 
foot in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he 
find them fit for him to grow in; and if he would thrive in 
them, he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood 
and youth as dreams, he must forget the prayers of his child- 
hood, and must take on him the harness of routine and ob- 
sequiousness. If not so minded, nothing is left him but to 
begin the world anew, as he does who puts the spade into 
the ground for food. We are all implicated, of course, in 
this charge ; it is only necessary to ask a few questions as 
to the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields 
where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we 
eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred com- 
modities. How many articles of daily consumption are 
furnished us from the West Indies ; yet it is said that in the 
Spanish islands the venality of the officers of the government 
has passed into usage, and that no article passes into our 
ships which has not been fraudulently cheapened. In the 
Spanish islands, every agent or factor of the Americans, 
unless he be consul, has taken oath that he is a Catholic, 
or has caused a priest to make that declaration for him. 
The abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the 



48 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Southern negro. In the island of Cuba, in addition to the 
ordinary abominations of slavery, it appears only men are 
bought for the plantations, and one dies in ten every year, 
of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I leave for 
those who have the knowledge the part of sifting the oaths 
of our custom-houses ; I will not inquire into the oppression of 
the sailors ; I will not pry into the usages of our retail trade. 
I content myself with the fact that the general system 
of our trade (apart from the blacker traits, which, I hope, 
are exceptions denounced and unshared by all reputable men) 
is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high senti- 
ments of human nature, is not measured by the exact law 
of reciprocity, much less by the sentiments of love and hero- 
ism; but is a system of distrust, of concealment, of superior 
keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage. It is not 
that which a man delights to unlock to a noble friend, 
which he meditates on with joy and self-approval in his hour 
of love and aspiration; but rather what he then puts out 
of sight, only showing the brilliant result, and atoning for the 
manner of acquiring by the manner of expending it. I do 
not charge the merchant or the manufacturer. The sins of 
our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, 
one distributes, one eats. Everybody partakes, everybody 
confesses, with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet 
none feels himself accountable. He did not create the 
abuse; he cannot alter it. What is he? an obscure private 
person who must get his bread. That is the vice, — that 
no one feels himself called to act for man, but only as a 
fraction of man. It happens, therefore, that all such in- 
genuous souls as feel within themselves the irrepressible 
strivings of a noble aim, who by the law of their nature 
must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit for them, 
and they come forth from it. Such cases are becoming 
more numerous every year. 

But by coming out of trade you have not cleared yourself. 
The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative profes- 
sions and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each 
finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualifica- 
tion for success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain 
shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an 



MAN THE REFORMER 49 

acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments 
of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and 
lofty integrity. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole 
institution of property, until our laws which establish and 
protect it seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but 
of selfishness. Suppose a man is so unhappy as to be born 
a saint, with keen perceptions, but with the conscience and 
love of an angel, and he is to get his living in the world; 
he finds himself excluded from all lucrative works; he has 
no farm, and he cannot get one ; for to earn money enough 
to buy one requires a sort of concentration toward money, 
which is the selling himself for a number of years, and to 
him the present hour is as sacred and inviolable as any 
future hour. Of course, whilst another man has no land, 
my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated. 
Inextricable seem to be the twinings and tendrils of this 
evil, and we all involve ourselves in it the deeper by form- 
ing connections, by wives and children, by benefits and 
debts. 

Considerations of this kind have turned the attention of 
many philanthropic and intelligent persons to the claims of 
manual labor as a part of the education of every young man. 
If the accumulated wealth of the past generations is thus 
tainted, — no matter how much of it is offered to us, — we 
must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to 
renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with 
the soil and Nature, and abstaining from whatever is dis- 
honest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, 
with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world. 

But it is said : — " What ! will you give up the immense 
advantages reaped from the division of labor, and set every 
man to make his own shoes, bureau, knife, wagon, sails, and 
needle? This would be to put men back into barbarism 
by their own act." I see no instant prospect of a virtuous 
revolution; yet I confess I should not be pained at a change 
which threatened a loss of some of the luxuries or con- 
veniences of society, if it proceeded from a preference of 
the agricultural life out of the belief that our primary 
duties as men could be better discharged in that calling. 
Who could regret to see a high conscience and a purer taste 



50 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

exercising a sensible effect on young men in their choice 
of occupation, and thinning the ranks of competition in the 
labors of commerce, of law and of state? It is easy to 
see that the inconvenience would last but a short time. 
This would be great action, which always opens the eyes 
of men. When many persons shall have done this, when the 
majority shall admit the necessity of reform in all these 
institutions, their abuses will be redressed, and the way will 
be open again to the advantages which arise from the divi- 
sion of labor, and a man may select the fittest employment 
for his peculiar talent again, without compromise. 

But quite apart from the emphasis which the times give 
to the doctrine that the manual labor of society ought to 
be shared among all the members, there are reasons proper 
to every individual why he should not be deprived of it. 
The use of manual labor is one which never grows obsolete, 
and which is inapplicable to no person. A man should have 
a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have 
a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate enter- 
tainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our 
hands. We must have an antagonism in the tough world 
for all the variety of our spiritual faculties or they will 
not be born. Manual labor is the study of the external 
world. The advantage of riches remains with him who 
procured them, not with the heir. When I go into my gar- 
den with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration 
and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding my- 
self all this time in letting others do for me what I should 
have done with my own hands. But not only health, but 
education, is in the work. Is it possible that I who get 
indefinite quantities of sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, 
crockery ware, and letter paper, by simply signing my name 
once in three months to a check in favor of John Smith and 
Co., traders, get the fair share of exercise to my faculties 
by that act, which Nature intended for me in making all 
these far-fetched matters important to my comfort? It is 
Smith himself, and his carriers, and dealers, and manu- 
facturers, it is the sailor, the hidedrogher, the butcher, the 
negro, the hunter, and the planter who have intercepted the 
sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the cotton. They have 



MAN THE REFORMER 51 

got the education, I only the commodity. This were all 
very well if I were necessarily absent, being detained by 
work of my own, like theirs, work of the same faculties; 
then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but now I feel 
some shame before my wood-chopper, my ploughman, and 
my cook, for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can 
contrive without my aid to bring the day and year round, 
but I depend on them, and have not earned by use a right 
to my arms and feet. 

Consider further the difference between the first and 
second owner of property. Every species of property is 
preyed on by its own enemies, as iron by rust; timber by 
rot; cloth by moths; provisions by mould, putridity, or 
vermin ; money by thieves ; an orchard by insects ; a planted 
field by weeds and the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle 
by hunger; a road by rain and frost; a bridge by freshets. 
And whoever takes any of these things into his possession, 
takes the charge of defending them from this troop of 
enemies, or of keeping them in repair. A man who supplies 
his own want, who builds a raft or a boat to go a-fishing, 
finds it easy to calk it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the 
rudder. What he gets only as fast as he wants for his own 
ends, does not embarrass him, or take away his sleep with 
looking after. But when he comes to give all the goods 
he has year after year collected, in one estate to his son, 
— house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges, hardware, 
wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, books, money, — 
and cannot give him the skill and experience which made or 
collected these, and the method and place they have in his 
own life, the son finds his hands full, — not to use these 
things, but to look after them and defend them from their 
natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters. 
Their enemies will not remit; rust, mould, vermin, rain, 
sun, freshet, fire, all seize their own, fill him with vexation, 
and he is converted from the owner into a watchman or 
a watch-dog to this magazine of old and new chattels. 
What a change ! Instead of the masterly good humor, 
and sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; 
instead of those strong and learned hands, those piercing 
and learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty and 



52 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

prevailing heart, which the father had, whom nature 
loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast 
and fish seemed all to know and to serve, we have now a 
puny, protected person, guarded by walls and curtains, 
stoves and down beds, coaches, and men-servants and 
women-servants from the earth and the sky, and who, bred 
to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that en- 
dangers those possessions, and is forced to spend so much 
time in guarding them, that he has quite lost sight of their 
original use, namely, to help him to his ends, — to the prose- 
cution of his love, to the helping of his friend, to the wor- 
ship of his God, to the enlargement of his knowledge, to 
the serving of his country, to the indulgence of his senti- 
ment, and he is now what is called a rich man, — the menial 
and runner of his riches. 

Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies 
in the fortunes of the poor. Knowledge, virtue, power, are 
the victories of man over his necessities, his march to the 
dominion of the world. Every man ought to have this op- 
portunity to conquer the world for himself. Only such per- 
sons interest us — Spartans, Romans, Saracens, English, 
Americans — who have stood in the jaws of need, and have 
by their own wit and might extricated themselves and made 
man victorious. 

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, or insist 
that every man should be a farmer, any more than that 
every man should be a lexicographer. In general, one may 
say that the husbandman's is the oldest and most universal 
profession, and that where a man does not yet discover 
in himself any fitness for one work more than another, this 
may be preferred. But the doctrine of the farm is merely 
this, that every man ought to stand in primary relations 
with the work of the world, ought to do it himself, and 
not to suffer the accident of his having a purse in his 
pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonorable and 
injurious craft, to sever him from those duties; and for this 
reason, that labor is God's education; that he only is a sin- 
cere learner, he only can become a master, who learns the 
secrets of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from 
Nature its sceptre. 



MAN THE REFORMER 53 

Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the learned 
professions, of the poet, the priest, the law-giver, and men 
of study generally; namely, that in the experience of all 
men of that class, the amount of manual labor which is 
necessary to the maintenance of a family, indisposes and 
disqualifies for intellectual exertion. I know it often, per- 
haps usually, happens., that where there is a fine organization 
apt for poetry and philosophy, that individual finds himself 
compelled to wait on his thoughts, to waste several days that 
he may enhance and glorify one; and is better taught by a 
moderate and dainty exercise, such as rambling in the fields, 
rowing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudgery 
of the farmer and the smith. I would not quite forget the 
venerable counsel of the Egyptian mysteries., which de- 
clared that " there were two pair of eyes in maa and it 
is requisite that the pair which are beneath should be 
closed when the pair that are above them perceive, and that 
when the pair above are closed, those which are beneath 
should be opened." Yet I will suggest that no separation 
from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth 
to the seer himself; that, I doubt not, the faults and vices 
of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness, 
effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the ener- 
vated and sickly habits of the literary class. Better that 
the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker 
abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast 
to all that he has written. 

But granting that for ends so sacred and dear, some 
relaxation must be had, I think, that if a man find in him- 
self any strong bias to poetry, to art, to the contemplative 
life, drawing him to these things with a devotion incompatible 
with good husbandry, that man ought to reckon early with 
himself, and, respecting the compensations of the Universe, 
ought to ransom himself from the duties of economy by a 
certain rigor and privation in his habits. For privileges 
so rare and grand, let him not stint to pay a great tax. Let 
him be a csenobite, a pauper, and, if need be, celibate also. 
Let him learn to eat his meals standing, and to relish the 
taste of fair water and black bread. He may leave to others 
the costly conveniences of housekeeping, and large hos- 

d ncv 



54 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

pitality, and the possession of works of art. Let him feel 
that genius is a hospitality, and that he who can create 
works of art needs not collect them. He must live in a 
chamber, and postpone his self-indulgence, forewarned and 
■ forearmed against that frequent misfortune of men of genius, 
— the taste for luxury. This is the tragedy of genius, — at- 
tempting to drive along the ecliptic with one horse of the 
heavens and one horse of the earth, there is only discord 
and ruin and downfall to chariot and charioteer. 

The duty that every man should assume his own vows, 
should call the institutions of society to account, and ex- 
amine their fitness to him, gains in emphasis, if we look at 
our modes of living. Is our housekeeping sacred and honor- 
able? Does it raise and inspire us, or does it cripple us 
instead ? I ought to be armed by every part and function of my 
household, by all my social function, by my economy, by my 
feasting, by my voting, by my traffic. Yet I am almost no party 
to any of these things. Custom does it for me, gives me no 
power therefrom, and runs me in debt to boot. We spend 
our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred trifles, I 
know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our ex- 
pense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we 
run in debt; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, 
not worship, that costs so much. Why needs any man be 
rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome 
apartments, access to public houses and places of amuse- 
ment? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new 
image, and he flees into a solitary garden or garret to enjoy 
it, and is richer with that dream than the fee of a county 
could make him. But we are first thoughtless, and then 
find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual, and then 
must be rich. We dare not trust our wit for making our 
house pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams. 
He is accustomed to carpets, and we have not sufficient 
character to put floor-cloths out of his mind whilst he stays 
in the house, and so we pile the floor with carpets. Let 
the house rather be a temple of the Furies of Lacedsemon, 
formidable and holy to all, which none but a Spartan may 
enter or so much as behold. As soon as there is faith, as 
soon as there is society, comfits and cushions will be left to 



MAN THE REFORMER 55 

slaves. Expense will be inventive and heroic. We shall 
eat hard and lie hard ; we shall dwell like the ancient Romans 
in narrow tenements, whilst our public edifices, like theirs, 
will be worthy for their proportion of the landscape in which 
we set them, for conversation, for art, for music, for worship. 
We shall be rich to great purposes; poor only for selfish 
ones. 

Now what help for these evils? How can the man who 
has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life 
honestly ? Shall we say all we think ? — perhaps with his own 
hands. Suppose he collects or makes them ill ; yet he has 
learned their lesson. If he cannot do that, then perhaps 
he can go without. Immense wisdom and riches are in that. 
It is better to go without, than to have them at too 1 great 
a cost. Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is 
a high, humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is grand, 
when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised 
for freedom, or love, or devotion. Much of the economy 
which we see in houses is of a base origin, and is best kept 
out of sight. Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have 
roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness ; but parched 
corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of 
all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what 
the mind shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest 
mission of knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods and 
heroes. 

Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full 
of infirm people, who incessantly summon others to serve 
them. They contrive everywhere to exhaust for their single 
comfort the entire means and appliances of that luxury to 
which our invention has yet attained. Sofas, ottomans, 
stoves, wine, game-fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the theatre, 
entertainments, — all these they want, they need, and what- 
ever can be suggested more than these, they crave also, as 
if it was the bread which should keep them from starving; 
and if they miss any one, they represent themselves as the 
most wronged and most wretched persons on earth. One 
must have been born and bred with them to know how to 
prepare a meal for their learned stomach. Meantime, they 
never bestir themselves to serve another person; not they! 



56 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

they have a great deal more to do for themselves than they 
can possibly perform, nor do they once perceive the cruel 
joke of their lives; but the more odious they grow, the 
sharper is the tone of their complaining and craving. Can 
anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve 
them one's self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead 
of being always prompt to grab? It is more elegant to 
answer one's own needs than to be richly served; inelegant 
perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an ele- 
gance forever and to all. 

I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic in reform. I do 
not wish to push my criticism on the state of things around 
me to that extravagant mark that shall compel me to suicide, 
or to an absolute isolation from the advantages of civil 
society. If we suddenly plant our foot, and say, I will 
neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric 
which I do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person 
whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we 
shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not 
his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the 
interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day 
by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common 
benefit; and we must not cease to tend to the correction of 
these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day. 

But the idea which now begins to agitate society has a 
wider scope than our daily employments, our households, 
and the institutions of property. We are to revise the whole 
of our social structure, the state, the school, religion, mar- 
riage, trade, science, and explore their foundations in our 
own nature; we are to see that the world not only fitted the 
former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves of every 
usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is a 
man born for but to be a reformer, a remaker of what man 
has made ; a renouncer of lies ; a restorer of truth and good, 
imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and 
which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour re- 
pairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and 
with every pulsation a new life? Let him renounce every- 
thing which is not true to him, and put all his practices back 
on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has 



MAN THE REFORMER 57 

not the whole world for his reason. If there are incon- 
veniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we 
have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be 
like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the 
deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of 
life. 

The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all 
efforts of reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite 
worthiness in man which will appear at the call of worth, 
and that all particular reforms are the removing of some 
impediment. Is it not the highest duty that man should be 
honored in us? I ought not to allow any man, because he 
has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I 
ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, 
that I cannot be bought, — neither by comfort, neither by 
pride, — and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread 
from him, that he is the poor man beside me. And if, at the 
same time, a woman or a child discovers a sentiment of 
piety, or a juster way of thinking than mine, I ought to 
confess it by my respect and obedience, though it go to 
alter my whole way of life. 

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not 
Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is 
more lost sight of. We use these words as if they were as 
obsolete as Selah and Amen. And yet they have the broad- 
est meaning, and the most cogent application to Boston in 
1841. The Americans have no faith. They rely on the 
power of a dollar ; they are deaf to a sentiment. They think 
you may talk the north wind down as easily as raise society ; 
and no class more faithless than the scholars or intellectual 
men. Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my friend, 
with a poet, with a conscientious youth who is still under 
the dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet har- 
nessed in the team of society to drag with us all in the ruts 
of custom, I see at once how paltry is all this generation of 
unbelievers, and what a house of cards their institutions are, 
and I see what one brave man, what one great thought exe- 
cuted might effect. I see that the reason of the distrust 
of the practical man in all theory is his inability to perceive 
the means whereby we work. Look, he says, at the tools 



58 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

with which this world of yours is to be built. As we cannot 
make a planet, with atmosphere, rivers, and forests, by 
means of the best carpenters' or engineers' tools, with chem- 
ist's laboratory and smith's forge to boot, — so neither can 
we ever construct that heavenly society you prate of, out 
of foolish, sick, selfish men and women, such as we know 
them to be. But the believer not only beholds his heaven 
to be possible, but already to begin to exist, — not by the 
men or materials the statesman uses, but by men trans- 
figured and raised above themselves by the power of prin- 
ciples. # To principles something else is possible that tran- 
scends all the power of expedients. 

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of 
the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm. The victories 
of the Arabs after Mahomet, who, in a few years, from a 
small and mean beginning, established a larger empire than 
that of Rome, is an example. They did they knew not what. 
The naked Derar horsed on an idea, was found an over- 
' match for a troop of Roman cavalry. The women fought 
like men, and conquered the Roman men. They were miser- 
ably equipped, miserably fed. They were temperance troops. 
There was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed them. 
They conquered Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on barley. 
The Caliph Omar's walking-stick struck more terror into 
those who saw it than another man's sword. His diet was 
barley bread; his sauce was salt; and oftentimes by way 
of abstinence he ate his bread without salt. His drink was 
water. His palace was built of mud; and when he left 
Medina to go to the conquest of Jerusalem, he rode on a 
red camel, with a wooden platter hanging at his saddle, with 
a bottle of water and two sacks, one holding barley, and the 
other dried fruits. 

But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes 
of living, a nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the 
sentiment of love. This is the one remedy for all ills, the 
panacea of Nature. We must be lovers, and at once the 
impossible becomes possible. Our age and history, for these 
thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but 
of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money 
we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We 



MAN THE REFORMER 59 

make, by distrust, the thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and 
by our court and jail we keep him so. An acceptance of 
the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season 
would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, 
with the devotion of his faculties to our service. See this 
wide society of laboring men and women. We allow our- 
selves to be served by them, we live apart from them, and 
meet them without a salute in the streets. We do not greet 
their talents, nor rejoice in their good fortune, nor foster 
their hopes, nor in the assembly of the people vote for what 
is dear to them. Thus we enact the part of the selfish noble 
and king from the foundation of the world. See, this tree 
always bears one fruit. In every household the peace of a 
pair is poisoned by the malice, slyness, indolence, and aliena- 
tion of domestics. Let any two matrons meet, and observe 
how soon their conversation turns on the troubles from their 
" help" as our phrase is. In every knot of laborers, the rich 
man does not feel himself among his friends, — and at the 
polls he finds them arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition 
to him. We complain that the politics of masses of the 
people are controlled by designing men, and led in opposition 
to manifest justice and the common weal, and to their own 
interest. But the people do not wish to be represented or 
ruled by the ignorant and base. They only vote for these, 
because they were asked with the voice and semblance of 
kindness. They will not vote for them long. They in- 
evitably prefer wit and probity. To use an Egyptian meta- 
phor, it is not their will for any long time "to raise the 
nails of wild beasts, and to depress the heads of the sacred 
birds. " Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would 
operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions. It is better 
to work on institutions by the sun than by the wind. The 
state must consider the poor man, and all voices must speak 
for him. Every child that is born must have a just chance 
for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws of property 
proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasp- 
ing of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. Let 
us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should 
take more than his share, let him be ever so rich. Let me 
feel that I am to be a lover. I am to see to it that the world 



60 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

is the better for me, and to find my reward in the act. Love 
would put a new face on this weary old world in which we 
dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm 
the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, 
the impotence of armies, and navies, and lines of defence, 
would be superseded by this unarmed child. Love will creep 
where it cannot go, will accomplish that by imperceptible 
methods — being its own lever, fulcrum, and power — which 
force could never achieve. Have you not seen in the woods, 
in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or mushroom, — a 
plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a 
soft mush or jelly, — by its constant, total, and inconceivably 
gentle pushing, manage to break its way up through the 
frosty ground, and actually to lift a hard crust on its head? 
It is the symbol of the power of kindness. The virtue of 
this principle in human society in application to great in- 
terests is obsolete and forgotten. Once or twice in history it 
has been tried in illustrious instances, with signal success. 
This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps 
alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But one day 
all men will be lovers ; and every calamity will be dissolved 
in the universal sunshine. 

Will you suffer me to add one trait more to this portrait of 
man the reformer? The meditator between the spiritual and 
the actual world should have a great prospective prudence. 
An Arabian poet describes his hero by saying, 

" Sunshine was he 
In the winter day ; 
And in the midsummer 
Coolness and shade." 

He who would help himself and others should not be a subject 
of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent, 
persisting, immovable person, such as we have seen a few 
scattered up and down in time for the blessing of the world ; 
men who have in the gravity of their nature a quality which 
answers to the fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes the 
motion equably over all the wheels, and hinders it from fall- 
ing unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It is bet- 
ter that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of 



MAN THE REFORMER 61 

strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies, 
full of danger and followed by reactions. There is a sub- 
lime prudence which is the very highest that we know of 
man, which, believing in a vast future, sure of more to 
come than is yet seen, postpones always the present hour to 
the whole life ; postpones talent to genius, and special results 
to character. As the merchant gladly takes money from his 
income to add to his capital, so is the great man very willing 
to lose particular powers and talents so that he gain in the 
elevation of his life. The opening of the spiritual senses 
disposes men ever to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal 
talents, their best means and skill of procuring a present 
success, their power and their fame, to cast all things be- 
hind, in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A 
purer fame, a greater power, rewards the sacrifice. It is 
the conversion of our harvest into seed. As the farmer casts 
into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will 
come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly 
convert more than we now possess into means and powers, 
when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for 
seeds. 

/ 



SELF-RELIANCE 

(.841) 

Ne te quaesiveris extra. 

Man is his own star; and the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate; 
Nothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. 

—Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. 



Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat, 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
Power and speed be hands and feet. 

I READ the other day some verses written by an eminent 
painter which were original and not conventional. Al- 
ways the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the 
subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more 
value than any thought they may contain. To believe your 
own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your 
private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak 
your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; 
for always the inmost becomes the outmost — and our first 
thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last 
Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, 
the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is 
that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not 
what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to 
detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across 
his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament 
of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his 
thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we 
recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us 

63 



64 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have 
no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us 
to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored 
inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on 
the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with 
masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and 
felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame 
our own opinion from another. 

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives 
at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is 
suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as 
his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, 
no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through 
his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him 
to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, 
and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor 
does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, 
one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and 
another none. It is not without preestablished harmony, this 
sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed where one ray 
should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. 
Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable of his confession. 
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that 
divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely 
trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faith- 
fully imparted, but God will not have his work made mani- 
fest by cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything 
divine. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his 
heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said 
or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliver- 
ance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius de- 
serts him ; no muse befriends ; no invention, no hope. 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. 
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, 
the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. 
Great men have always done so, and confided themselves 
childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their percep- 
tion that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working 
through their hands, predominating in all their being. And 
we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the 



SELF-RELIANCE 65 

same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not 
cowards fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and bene- 
factors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty 
effort let us advance on Chaos and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in th- 
face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes. That 
divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because 
our arithmetic has computed the strength and means op- 
posed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being 
whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look 
in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to 
nobody; all conform to it; so that one babe commonly 
makes four or five out of the- adults who prattle and play to 
it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no 
less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable 
and gracious and its claims not to' be put by, if it will stand 
by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he 
cannot speak to you and me. Hark ! in the next room who 
spoke so clear and emphatic? It seems he knows how to 
speak to his contemporaries. Good Heaven ! it is he ! it 
is that very lump of bashfulness and phlegm which for weeks 
has done nothing but eat when you were by, and now rolls 
out these words like bell-strokes. It seems he knows how to 
speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will 
know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. 

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and 
would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to concili- 
ate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. How is a boy 
the master of society; independent, irresponsible, looking out 
from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries 
and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary 
way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, trouble- 
some. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about 
interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You 
must court him; he does not court you. But the man 
is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As 
soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a com- 
mitted person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of 
hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. 
There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again 



66 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

into his neutral, godlike independence ! Who can thus lose 
all pledge and, having observed, observe again from the same 
^naffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, 
mu X always be formidable, must always engage the poet's 
» nc j; the man's regards. Of such an immortal youth the 
force would be felt. He would utter opinions on all passing 
affairs, which being seen to be not private but necessary, 
would sink like darts into the ear of men and put them 
in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they 
grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. So- 
ciety everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of 
every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, 
in which the members agree, for the better securing of his 
bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and cul- 
ture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. 
Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and 
creators, but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He 
who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by 
the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. 
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. 
Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of 
the world. I remember an answer which when quite young 
I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to 
importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. 
On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of 
traditions, if I live wholly from within ? my friend suggested, 
— " But these impulses may be from below, not from above." 
I replied, " They do not seem to me to be such ; but if I am 
the devil's child, I will live then from the devil." No law 
can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad 
are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the 
only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong 
what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the pres- 
ence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and 
ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we 
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead 
institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects 
and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and 



SELF-RELIANCE 67 

vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and 
vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass ? If an 
angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and 
comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should 
I not say to him, " Go love thy infant ; love thy wood-chop- 
per ; be good-natured and modest ; have that grace ; and never 
varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible 
tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar 
is spite at home." Rough and graceless would be such 
greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. 
Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. 
The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counter- 
action of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. 
I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my 
genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door- 
post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, 
but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me 
not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. 
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of 
my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are 
they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that 
I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men 
as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There 
is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am 
bought and sold ; for them I will go to prison if need be ; 
but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at 
college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain 
end to which many now stand ; alms to sots, and the thou- 
sandfold Relief Societies ; — though I confess with shame I 
sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, 
which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception 
than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do 
what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or 
charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily 
non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an 
apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as in- 
valids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are 
penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life 
is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a 



'/ 



68 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strai'n, 
so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering 
and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to 
need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should 
be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. I ask primary 
evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from 
the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no 
difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are 
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege 
where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts 
may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assur- 
ance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testi- 
mony. 

j What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the 
people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in 
intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between 
greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will 
always find those who think they know what is your duty 
better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after 
the world's opinion ; it is easy in solitude to live after our 
own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd 
keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages that have become 
dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time 
and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain 
a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible Society, vote with 
a great party either for the Government or against it, spread 
your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I 
have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And of 
course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. 
But do your thing, and I shall know you. Do your work, 
and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what 
a blindman's-buff is this game of 'conformity. If I know 
your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher an- 
nounce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the 
institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that 
not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do 
I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the 
grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I 
not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at 



SELF-RELIANCE 69 

one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish 
minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the 
bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have, 
bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and at- 
tached themselves to some one of these communities of 
opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few 
particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. 
Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the 
real two, their four not the real four: so that every word 
they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set 
them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the 
prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come 
to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees 
the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying ex- 
perience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself 
also in the general history ; I mean " the foolish face of 
praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where 
we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does 
not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but 
moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the 
outline of the face, and make the most disagreeable sensa- 
tion; a sensation of rebuke and warning which no brave 
young man will suffer twice. 

For non-conformity the world whips you with its dis- 
pleasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate 
a sour face. The bystanders look askance on him in the 
public street or in the friend's parlor. If this aversation 
had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own he 
might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour 
faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep 
cause — disguise no god, but are put on and off as the wind 
blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the 
multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the 
college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the 
world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage 
is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very 
vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the 
indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and 
the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that 
lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it 

E HCV 



70 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it god- 
like as a trifle of no concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our con- 
sistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the 
eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit 
than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? 
Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest 
you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that 
public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what 
then ? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your 
memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to 
bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, 
and live ever in a new day. Trust your emotion. In your 
metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet 
when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them 
heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape 
and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand 
of the harlot, and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, 
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. 
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. 
He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the 
wall. Out upon your guarded lips ! Sew them up with 
packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you j ( 
think to-day in words as hard as cannon balls, and to- 
morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, 
though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, | T 
exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunder- 
stood ! Misunderstood ! It is a right fool's word. Is it 
so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was mis- 
understood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Co- 
pernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise 
spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunder- 
stood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of |t 
his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the in- 
equalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the 
curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge 
and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian 



SELF-RELIANCE 71 

stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells 
the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which 
God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought 
without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be 
found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. 
My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum 
of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave 
that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. 
We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our 
wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or 
vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or 
vice emit a breath every moment. 

Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety 
of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. 
For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however un- 
like they seem. These varieties are lost sight of when seen 
at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tend- 
ency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag 
line of a hundred tacks. This is only microscopic criticism. 
See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens 
itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will 
explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. 
Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you 
have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness 
always appeals to the future. If I can be great enough now 
to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right 
before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right 
now. Always scorn appearances and you always may. The 
force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days 
of virtue work their health into this. What makes the 
majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so 
fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great 
days and victories behind. There they all stand and shed 
an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as 
by a visible escort of angels to every man's eye. That is 
it which throws thunder into Chatham's voice, and dignity 
into Washington's port, and America into Adams's eye. 
Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is al- 
ways ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is 
not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is 



72 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, 
self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, 
even if shown in a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity 
and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous 
henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear 
a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize 
never more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. 
I do not wish to please him: I wish that he should wish to 
please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I 
would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront 
and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid content- 
ment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade 
and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that 
there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wher- 
ever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time 
or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there 
is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. 
You are constrained to accept his standard. Ordinarily, 
every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of 
some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of noth- 
ing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man 
must be so much that he must make all circumstances in- 
different — put all means into the shade. This all great men 
are and do. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an 
age ; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to 
accomplish his thought; — and posterity seem to follow his 
steps as a procession. A man Caesar is born, and for ages 
after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions 
of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is con- 
founded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution 
is the lengthened shadow of one man ; as, the Reformation, 
of Luther ; Quakerism, of Fox ; Methodism, of Wesley ; Abo- 
lition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called " the height of 
Rome;" and all history resolves itself very easily into the 
biography of a few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under 
his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down 
with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in 
the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, 






SELF-RELIANCE 73 

finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force 
which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor 
when he looks at these. To him a palace, a statue, or a 
costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay 
equipage, and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, sir?' 
Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his 
faculties that they will come out and take possession. The 
picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but 
I am to settle its claim to praise. That popular fable of the 
sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to 
the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's 
bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony 
like the duke, and assured that rie had been insane — owes 
its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state 
of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then 
wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true 
prince. 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our 
imagination makes fools of us, plays us false. Kingdom and 
lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than 
private John and Edward in a small house and common day's 
work : but the things of life are the same to both : the sum 
total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred 
and Scanderbeg and Gustavus ? Suppose they were virtuous ; 
did they wear out virtue ? As great a stake depends on your 
private act to-day as followed their public and renowned 
steps. When private men shall act with original views, the 
lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those 
of gentlemen. 

The world has indeed been instructed by its kings, who 
have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught 
by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from 
man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have every- 
where suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to 
walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of 
men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with 
money but with honor, and represent the Law in his person, 
was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their 
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right 
of every man. 



74 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is ex- 
plained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is 
the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a uni- 
versal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and 
power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without 
calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into 
trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence 
appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the 
essence of genius, the essence of virtue, and the essence of 
life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this 
primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are 
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which anal- 
ysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the 
sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, 
in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from 
light, from time, from man, but one with them and pro- 
ceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life 
and being also proceedeth. We first share the life by which 
things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in na- 
ture and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is 
the fountain of action and the fountain of thought. Here 
are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, 
of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied without 
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelli- 
gence, which makes us organs of its activity and receivers 
of its truth. When we discern justice, when he discern 
truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its 
beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into 
the soul that causes — all metaphysics, all philosophy is at 
fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every 
man discerns between the voluntary acts of his mind and his 
involuntary perceptions. And to his involuntary perceptions 
he knows a perfect respect is due. He may err in the ex- 
pression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like 
day and night, not to be disputed. All my wilful actions and 
acquisitions are but roving; — the most trivial reverie, the 
faintest native emotion, are domestic and divine. Thoughtless 
people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as 
of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not 
distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that 



SELF-RELIANCE 75 

I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not 
whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it 
after me, and in course of time all mankind, — although it 
may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my 
perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure 
that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that 
when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, 
but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should 
scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the 
present thought; and new date and new create the whole. 
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, 
then old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples 
fall ; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the pres- 
ent hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — 
one thing as much as another. All things are dissolved to 
their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty 
and particular miracles disappear. This is and must be. If 
therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and car- 
ries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered 
nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. 
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and com- 
pletion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he 
has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the 
past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and 
majesty of the soul. Time and space are but physiological 
colors which the eye maketh, but the soul is light ; where it 
is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an imperti- 
nence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful 
apologue or parable of my being and becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he 
dares not say " I think," " I am," but quotes some saint or 
sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blow- 
ing rose. These roses under my window make no reference 
to former roses or to better ones ; they are for what they are ; 
they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. 
There is simply the rose ; it is perfect in every moment of its 
existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; 
in the full-blown flower there is no more ; in the leafless root 
there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature 



76 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man post- 
pones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but 
with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches 
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. 
He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature 
in the present, above time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intel- 
lects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the 
phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. 
We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a 
few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sen- 
tences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of 
the men of talents and character they chance to see, — pain- 
fully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, 
when they come into the point of view which those had who 
uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing 
to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as 
good when occasion comes. So was it with us, so will it be, 
if we proceed. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is 
as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak 
to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly 
disburthen the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rub- 
bish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as 
sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains 
unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the 
far off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what 
I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is 
near you, when you have life in yourself, — it is not by any 
known or appointed way; you shall not discern the foot- 
prints of any other ; you shall not see the face of man ; you 
shall not hear any name; — the way, the thought, the good, 
shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude all other 
being. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons 
that ever existed are its fugitive ministers. There shall be 
no fear in it. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks 
nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are then 
in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor 
properly joy. The soul is raised over passion. It seeth 
identity and eternal causation. It is a perceiving that Truth 



SELF-RELIANCE 77 

and Right are. Hence it becomes a Tranquillity out of the 
knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature ; the 
Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea ; vast intervals of time, years, 
centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel 
underlay that former state of life and circumstances, as it 
does underlie my present and will always all circumstances, 
and what is called life and what is called death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in 
the instant of repose ; it resides in the moment of transition 
from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the 
darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the 
soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past; turns all 
riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame ; confounds the 
saint with the rogue; shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. 
Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the 
soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. 
To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. 
Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is. 
Who has more soul than I masters me, though he should 
not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravi- 
tation of spirits. Who has less I rule with like facility. We 
fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do 
not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a com- 
pany of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law 
of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, 
rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on 
this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever- 
blessed One. Virtue is the governor, the creator, the reality. 
All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. 
Hardship, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, per- 
sonal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as ex- 
amples of the soul's presence and impure action. I see the 
same law working in nature for conservation and growth. 
The poise of a planet, the bended tree recovering itself from 
the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and 
vegetable, are also demonstrations of the self-sufficing and 
therefore self-relying soul. All history, from its highest to 
its trivial passages, is the various record of this power. 

Thus all concentrates; let us not rove; let us sit at home 



78 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rab- 
ble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration 
of the divine fact. Bid them take the shoes from off their 
feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, 
and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of 
nature and fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, 
nor is the soul admonished to stay at home, to put itself in 
communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to 
beg a cup of water of the urns of men. We must go alone. 
Isolation must precede true society. I like the silent church 
before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far 
off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one 
with a precinct or sanctuary. So let us always sit. Why 
should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, 
or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to 
have the same blood ? All men have my blood and I have all 
men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even 
to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation 
must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be eleva- 
tion. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to 
importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, 
sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet 
door and say, " Come out unto us." — Do not spill thy soul ; 
do not all descend; keep thy state; stay at home in thine 
own heaven; come not for a moment into their facts, into 
their hubbub of conflicting appearances, but let in the light 
of thy law on their confusion. The power men possess to 
annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can 
come near me but through my act. " What we love that we 
have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love." 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and 
faith, let us at least resist our temptations, let us enter into 
the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and 
constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our 
smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hos- 
pitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expecta- 
tion of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we 
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O 
brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances 



SELF-RELIANCE 79 

hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto 
you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal 
law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall en- 
deavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be 
the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must 
fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your 
customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any 
longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, 
we shall be happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to de- 
serve that you should. I must be myself. I will not hide my 
tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, 
that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever 
inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I 
will love you ; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself 
by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the 
same truth with me, cleave to your companions ; I will seek 
my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is 
alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long 
we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound 
harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your 
nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will 
bring us out safe at last. — But so may you give these friends 
pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save 
their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of 
reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth ; 
then will they justify me and do the same thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular stand- 
ards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; 
and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to 
gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There 
are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must 
be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing 
yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether 
you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, 
neighbor, town, cat and dog; whether any of these can up- 
braid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and 
absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and 
perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices 
that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts it 
enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one 



80 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment 
one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has 
cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured 
to trust himself for a task-master. High be his heart, faith- 
ful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be 
doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may 
be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others. 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called 
by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics, 
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we 
are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are 
afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and 
afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect 
persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life 
and our social state, but we see that most natures are in- 
solvent; cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition 
out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean 
and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is 
mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our re- 
ligion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. 
We are parlor soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, where 
strength is born, we shun. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose 
all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. 
If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not 
installed in an office within one year afterwards, in the cities 
or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends 
and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in 
complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New 
Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, 
who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, 
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and 
so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on 
his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks 
abreast with his days and feels no shame in not " studying 
a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives 
already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. 
Let a stoic arise who shall reveal the resources of man and 
tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must 






SELF-RELIANCE 81 

detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new 
powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, 
born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be 
ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts 
from himself, tossing the laws, the books v idolatries and cus- 
toms out of the window, — we pity him no more, but thank 
and revere him; — and that teacher shall restore the life of 
man to splendor and make his name dear to all History. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance — a new respect 
for the divinity in man — must work a revolution in all the 
offices and relations of men ; in their religion ; in their edu- 
cation; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their asso- 
ciation; in their property; in their speculative views** 

i. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That 
which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and 
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign ad- 
dition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself 
in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediato- 
rial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular com- 
modity — anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is 
the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point 
of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. 
It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But 
prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and mean- 
ness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and con- 
sciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will 
not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer 
of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer 
of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true 
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. 
Caratach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire 
the mind of the god Audate, replies : 

His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; 
Our valors are our best gods. 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent 
is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret 
calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend 
your own work and already the evil begins to be repaired. 
Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep 



82 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of im- 
parting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, 
putting them once more in communication with the soul. 
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore 
to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors 
are flung wide. Him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all 
eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and 
embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously 
and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held 
on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love 
him because men hated him. " To the persevering mortal," 
said Zoroaster, " the blessed Immortals are swift." 

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their 
creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish 
Israelites, " Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak 
thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey." Everywhere 
I am bereaved of meeting God in my brother, because he has 
shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his 
brother's, or his brother's brother's God. Every new mind is 
a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity 
and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a 
Spurzheim, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo ! 
a new system. In proportion always to the depth of the 
thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and 
brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But 
chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are 
also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the great 
elemental thought of Duty and man's relation to the Highest. 
Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgianism. The 
pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing 
to the new terminology that a girl does who has just learned 
botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It 
will happen for a time that the pupil will feel a real debt 
to the teacher — will find his intellectual power has grown 
by the study of his writings. This will continue until he 
has exhausted his master's mind. But in all unbalanced 
minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and 
not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of 
the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with 
the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to 



SELF-RELIANCE 83 

them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot 
imagine how you aliens have any right to see — how you can 
see; " It must be somehow that you stole the light from us." 
They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, 
will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp 
awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, 
presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, 
will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal 
light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, 
will beam over the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Travelling, 
the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for all edu- 
cated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece 
venerable in the imagination, did so not by rambling round 
creation as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where 
they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we 
feel that duty is our place and that the merry men of cir- 
cumstance should follow as they may. The soul is no travel- 
ler : the wise man stays at home with the soul, and when his 
necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his 
house, or into' foreign lands, he is at home still and is not 
gadding abroad from himself, and shall make men sensible by 
the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary 
of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a 
sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of 
the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, 
so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad 
with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. 
He who travels to be amused or to get somewhat which he 
does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old 
even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his 
will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He 
carries ruins to ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first jour- 
neys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream 
that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty 
and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, 
embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there 
beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, iden- 



84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

tical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. 
I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I 
am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a symptom of 
a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. 
The intellect is vagabond, and the universal system of edu- 
cation fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our 
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is 
imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are 
built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with 
foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole 
minds, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant, as the eyes 
of a maid follow her mistress. The soul created the arts 
wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind 
that the artist sought his model. It was an application of 
his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions 
to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the 
Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought 
and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if 
the American artist will study with hope and love the precise 
thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, 
the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and 
form of the government, he will create a house in which 
all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment 
will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself ; never imitate. Your own gift you can 
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole 
life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you 
have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which 
each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No 
man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has ex- 
hibited it. Where is the master who could have taught 
Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have in- 
structed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? 
Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism of Scipio 
is precisely that part he could not borrow. If anybody will 
tell me whom the great man imitates in the original crisis 
when he performs a great act, I will tell him who* else than 
himself can teach him. Shakspeare will never be made by the 
study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned thee and 



SELF-RELIANCE 85 

thou canst not hope too much or dare too much. There is 
at this moment, there is for me an utterance bare and grand 
as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the 
Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from 
all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, 
with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if 
I can hear what these patriarchs say, surely I can reply to 
them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue 
are two organs of one nature. Dwell up there in the simple 
and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt 
reproduce the Foreworld again. 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, 
so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on 
the improvement of society, and no man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as 
it gains on the other. Its progress is only apparent like 
the workers of a treadmill. It undergoes continual changes ; 
it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, 
it is scientific ; but this change is not amelioration. For every 
thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires 
new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between 
the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a 
watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the 
naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, 
a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. 
But compare the health of the two men and you shall see 
that his aboriginal strength, the white man has lost. If 
the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe 
and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if 
you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow 
shall send the white man to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use 
of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much 
support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he 
has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich 
nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the informa- 
tion when he wants it, the man in the street does not know 
a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the 
equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar 
of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books 

p HCV 



86 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

impair his memory: his libraries overload his wit; the in- 
surance-office increases the number of accidents ; and it may- 
be a question whether machinery does not encumber; 
whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a 
Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some 
vigor of wild virtue. For every stoic was a stoic; but in 
Christendom where is the Christian? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than 
in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now 
than ever were. A singular equality may be observed be- 
tween the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor 
can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nine- 
teenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's 
heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time 
is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, 
Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who 
is really of their class will not be called by their name, but 
be wholly his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. 
The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume 
and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved 
machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring 
accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to aston- 
ish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the 
resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, 
discovered a more splendid series of facts than any one since. 
Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is 
curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means 
and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a 
few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to 
essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of 
war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon con- 
quered Europe by the Bivouac, which consisted of falling 
back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The 
Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says 
Las Cases, "without abolishing our arms, magazines, com- 
missaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman 
custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind 
it in his hand-mill and bake his bread himself." 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the 
water of which it is composed does not. The same particle 



SELF-RELIANCE 87 

does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only 
phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, 
die, and their experience with them. 

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on 
governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. 
Men have looked away from themselves and at things so 
long that they have come to esteem what they call the soul's 
progress, namely, the religious, learned and civil institutions 
as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, 
because they feel them to be assaults on property. They 
measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and 
not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed 
of his property, ashamed of what he has, out of new respect 
for his being. Especially he hates what he has if he sees that 
it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or 
crime ; then he feels that it is not having ; it does not belong 
to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there because no 
revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a 
man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man 
acquires, is permanent and living property, which does not 
wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or 
storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wher- 
ever the man is put. " Thy lot or portion of life," said the 
Caliph Ali, " is seeking after thee ; therefore be at rest from 
seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods 
leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political 
parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the con- 
course and with each new uproar of announcement, The dele- 
gation from Essex ! The Democrats from New Hampshire ! 
The Whigs of Maine ! the young patriot feels himself strong- 
er than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like 
manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and re- 
solve in multitude. But not so O friends ! will the God deign 
to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the re- 
verse. It is only as a man puts off from himself all external 
support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to 
prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is 
not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, 
in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must pres- 
ently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He 



88 SELF-RELIANCE 

who knows that power is in the soul, that he is weak only 
because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, 
and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his 
thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect posi- 
tion, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man 
who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands 
on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with 
her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do 
thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause 
and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and 
acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and 
shalt always drag her after thee. A political victory, a rise 
of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your ab- 
sent friend, or some other quite external event raises your 
spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do 
not believe it. It can never be so. Nothing can bring you 
peace but yourself. Nothing can bring )jou peace but the 
triumph of principles. 



COMPENSATION 

(i8 4 i) 

EVER since I was a boy I have wished to write a dis- 
course on Compensation ; for it seemed to me when 
very young that on this subject Life was ahead of 
theology and the people knew more than the preachers 
taught. The documents too from which the doctrine is to 
be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and 
lay always before me, even in sleep ; for they are the tools 
in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of 
the street, the farm and the dwelling-house; the greetings, 
the relations, the debts and credits, the influence of char- 
acter, the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to 
me also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, 
the present action of the Soul of this world, clean from all 
vestige of tradition ; and so the heart of man might be 
bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with 
that which he knows was always and always must be, be- 
cause it really is now. It appeared moreover that if this 
doctrine could be stated in terms with any resemblance to 
those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes re- 
vealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and 1 
crooked passages in our journey, that would not suffer us to 
lose our way. 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon 
at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, 
unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last 
Judgment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in 
this world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are 
miserable; and then urged from reason and from Scripture 
a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life. 
No offence appeared to be taken by the congregation at this 

89 



90 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

doctrine. As far as I could observe when the meeting broke 
up they separated without remark on the sermon. 

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the 
preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the 
present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, 
horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst 
the saints are poor and despised; and that a compensation 
is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the like 
gratifications another day, — bank-stock and doubloons, veni- 
son and champagne? This must be the compensation in- 
tended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to 
pray and praise? to love and serve men? Why, that they 
can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would 
draw was, " We are to have such a good time as the sinners 
have now " ; — or, to push it to its extreme import, — " You 
sin now, we shall sin by-and-by; we would sin now, if we 
could; not being successful we expect our revenge to- 
morrow." 

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad 
are successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness 
of the preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate 
of the market of what constitutes a manly success, instead 
of confronting and convicting the world from the truth ; an- 
nouncing the Presence of the Soul; the omnipotence of the 
Will; and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of 
success and falsehood, and summoning the dead to its present 
tribunal. - 

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works 
of the day and the same doctrines assumed by the literary 
men when occasionally they treat the related topics. I think 
that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in 
principle, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men 
are better than this theology. Their daily life gives it the 
lie. Every ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine 
behind him in his own experience, and all men feel some- 
times the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. For 
men are wiser than they know. That which they hear in 
schools and pulpits without afterthought, if said in con- 
versation would probably be questioned in silence. If a man 
dogmatize in a mixed company on Providence and the divine 



COMPENSATION 91 

laws, he is answered by a silence which conveys well enough 
to an observer the dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his in- 
capacity to make his own statement. 

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record 
some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensa- 
tion; happy beyond my expectation if I shall truly draw the 
smallest arc of this circle. 

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part 
of nature ; in darkness and light, in heat and cold ; in the ebb 
and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration 
and expiration of plants and animals ; in the systole and 
diastole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of 
sound ; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity ; in electric- 
ity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Superinduce magnet- 
ism at one end of a needle, the opposite magnetism takes 
place at the other end. If the south attracts, the north repels. 
To empty here, you must condense there. An inevitable 
dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and sug- 
gests another thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; 
man, woman; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; 
motion, rest; yea, nay. 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. 
The entire system of things gets represented in every parti- 
cle. There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of 
the sea, day and night, man and woman, in a single needle 
of the pine, in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every 
animal tribe. The reaction, so grand in the elements, is re- 
peated within these small boundaries. For example, in the 
animal kingdom the physiologist has observed that no crea- 
tures are favorites, but a certain compensation balances every 
gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one part is 
paid out of a reduction from another part of the same 
creature. If the head and neck are enlarged, the trunk and 
extremities are cut short. 

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. 
What we gain in power is lost in time, and the converse. 
The periodic or compensating errors of the planets is an- 
other instance. The influences of climate and soil in political 
history are another. The cold climate invigorates. The bar- 
ren soil does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions. 



92 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of 
man. Every excess causes a defect ; every defect an excess. 
Every sweet hath its sour ; every evil its good. Every faculty 
which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on 
its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. 
For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every 
thing you have missed, you have gained something else ; and 
for every thing you gain, you lose something. If riches in- 
crease, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer 
gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts 
into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Na- 
ture hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea 
do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest tossing 
than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. 
There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down 
the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, sub- 
stantially on the same ground with all others. Is a man too 
strong and fierce for society and by temper and position a 
bad citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in 
him ? — nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters 
who are getting along in the dame's classes at the village 
school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl 
to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite 
and felspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in and 
keeps her balance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. 
But the President has paid dear for his White House. It 
has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his 
manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so con- 
spicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to 
eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the 
throne. Or do men desire the more substantial and perma- 
nent grandeur of genius? Neither has this an immunity. 
He who by force of will or of thought is great and over- 
looks thousands, has the responsibility of overlooking. With 
every influx of light comes new danger. Has he light? he 
must bear witness to the light, and always outrun that sym- 
pathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity 
to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must hate 
father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the world 



COMPENSATION 93 

loves and admires and covets? — he must cast behind him 
their admiration and afflict them by faithfulness to his truth 
and become a byword and a hissing. 

This Law writes the laws of the cities and nations. It will 
not be baulked" of its end in the smallest iota. It is in vain 
to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be 
mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though 
no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will 
appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is 
not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. 
If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not 
convict. Nothing arbitrary, nothing artificial can endure. 
The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the ut- 
most rigors or felicities of condition and to establish them- 
selves with great indifferency under all varieties of circum- 
stance. Under all governments the influence of character 
remains the same, — in Turkey and New England about alike. 
Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly con- 
fesses that man must have been as free as culture could 
make him. 

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is 
represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in 
nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is 
made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type 
under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a run- 
ning man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, 
a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the 
main character of the type, but part for part all the details, 
all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole 
system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, trans- 
action, is a compend of the world and a correlative of every 
other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its 
good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And 
each one must somehow accommodate the whole man and 
recite all his destiny. 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope 
cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being 
little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, 
and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all 
find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put 



94 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

our life into every act. The true doctrine of omnipresence 
is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and 
cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself 
into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the 
affinity, so the repulsion ; if the force, so the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That 
soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. 
We feel its inspirations ; out there in history we can see its 
fatal strength. It is almighty. All nature feels its grasp. 
" It is in the world, and the world was made by it." It is 
eternal but it enacts itself in time and space. Justice is not 
postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts 
of life. 01 xbftoi Aid? del eb-KiTcroixn. The dice of God are 
always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or 
a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances 
itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more 
nor less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every 
crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong re- 
dressed, in silence and certainty. What we call retribution 
is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wher- 
ever a part appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. 
If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to 
which it belongs is there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or in other words integrates 
itself, in a twofold manner : first in the thing, or in real 
nature ; and secondly in the circumstance, or in apparent na- 
ture. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The casual 
retribution is in the thing and is seen by the soul. The 
retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding ; 
it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a 
long time and so does not become distinct until after many 
years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, 
but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and pun- 
ishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that 
unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which 
concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and 
fruit, cannot be severed ; for the effect already blooms in the 
cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to be 
disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate ; 



COMPENSATION 95 

for example, — to gratify the senses we sever the pleasure of 
the senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity 
of man has been dedicated to the solution of one problem, — 
how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the 
sensual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, 
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off 
this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless ; to get a 
one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the body 
would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be 
one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. 
The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends 
of virtue; the body would have the power over things to 
its own ends. 

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. 
It would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it, 
— power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man 
aims to be somebody; to set up for himself; to truck and 
higgle for a private good; and, in particulars, to ride that he 
may ride; to dress that he may be dressed; to eat that he 
may eat; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to 
be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. 
They think that to be great is to get only one side of na- 
ture, — the sweet, without the other side, — the bitter. 

Steadily is this dividing and detaching counteracted. Up 
to this day it must be owned no projector has had the 
smallest success. The parted water reunites behind our hand. 
Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profita- 
ble things, power out of strong things, the moment we seek 
to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve 
things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get 
an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a 
shadow. " Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running 
back." 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the 
unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he 
does not know, brags that they do not touch him; — but the 
brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he 
escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital 
part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appear- 
ance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from him- 



96 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

self, and the retribution is so much death. So signal is the 
failure of all attempts to make this separation of the good 
from the tax, that the experiment would not be tried, — since 
to try it is to be mad, — but for the circumstance that when 
the disease began in the will, of rebellion and separation, the 
intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see 
God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual 
allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he 
sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's tail, and thinks 
he can cut off that which he would have from that which he 
would not have. " How secret art thou who dwellest in the 
highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling 
with an unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon 
such as have unbridled desires ! m 

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of 
fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It 
finds a tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks 
called Jupiter, Supreme Mind; but having traditionally as- 
cribed to him many base actions, they involuntarily made 
amends to Reason by tying up the hands of so bad a god. 
He is made as helpless as a king of England. Prometheus 
knows one secret which Jove must bargain for; Minerva, 
another. He cannot get his own thunders; Minerva keeps 
the key of them : 

Of all the gods, I only know the keys 

That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 

His thunders sleep. 

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of its 
moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics ; 
and indeed it would seem impossible for any fable to be in- 
vented and get any currency which was not moral. Aurora 
forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though so Tithonus is 
immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite invulnerable; for 
Thetis held him by the heel when she dipped him in the 
Styx and the sacred waters did not wash that part. Sieg- 
fried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf 
fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the Dragon's blood, 
and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it always 

1 St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I. 






COMPENSATION 97 

is. There is a crack in every thing God has made. Always 
it would seem there is this vindictive circumstance stealing 
in at unawares even into the wild poesy in which the human 
fancy attempted to make bold holiday and to shake itself free 
of the old laws,— this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, cer- 
tifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be 
given, all things are sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch 
in the Universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The 
Furies they said are attendants on Justice, and if the sun in 
heaven should transgress his path they would punish him. 
The poets related that stone walls and iron swords and 
leathern thongs had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of 
their owners; that the belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged 
the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels of the car of 
Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that 
on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded that when the 
Thasians erected a statue to Theogenes, a victor in the games, 
one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to throw 
it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its 
pedestal and was crushed to death beneath its fall. 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came 
from thought above the will of the writer. That is the best 
part of each writer which has nothing private in it; that 
is the best part of each which he does not know; that which 
flowed out of his constitution and not from his too active 
invention; that which in the study of a single artist you 
might not easily find, but in the study of many you would 
abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but*the 
work of man in that early Hellenic world that I would 
know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however 
convenient for history, embarrasses when we come to the 
highest criticism. We are to see that which man was tending 
to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, 
modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of 
Dante, of Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at the moment 
wrought. 

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the 
proverbs of all nations, which are always the literature of 
Reason, or the statements of an absolute truth without 






98 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

qualifications. Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, 
are the sanctuary of the Intuitions. That which the droning 
world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to 
say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs 
without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the 
pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached 
in all markets and all languages by flights of proverbs, whose 
teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and 
flies. 

All things are double, one against another. — Tit for tat; 
an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; 
measure for measure; love for love. — Give, and it shall be 
given you. — He that watereth shall be watered himself. — 
What will you have? quoth God; pay for it and take it. — 
Nothing venture, nothing have. — Thou shalt be paid exactly 
for what thou hast done, no more, no less. — Who doth not 
work shall not eat. — Harm watch, harm catch. — Curses al- 
ways recoil on the head of him who imprecates them. — If 
you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end 
fastens itself around your own. — Bad counsel confounds the 
adviser. — The devil is an ass. 

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action 
is overmastered and characterized above our will by the law 
of nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the 
public good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible mag- 
netism in a line with the poles of the world. 

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will 
or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his 
companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him 
who utters it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the 
other end remains in the thrower's bag. Or, rather, it is a 
harpoon thrown at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of 
cord in the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or not 
well thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain 
or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. " No 
man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," 
said Burke. The exclusive in fashionable life does not see 
that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to 
appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see 







COMPENSATION 99 

that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to 
shut out others. Treat men as pawns and nine-pins and you 
shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their heart, 
you shall lose your own. The senses would make things of 
all persons ; of women, of children, of the poor. The vulgar 
proverb, " I will get it from his purse or get it from his 
skin," is sound philosophy. 

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations 
are speedily punished. They are punished by Fear. Whilst 
I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no dis- 
pleasure in meeting him. We meet as water meets water, 
or as two currents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and 
interpenetration of nature. But as soon as there is any 
departure from simplicity and attempt at halfness, or good 
for me that is not good for him, my neighbor feels the 
wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I have shrunk from 
him; his eyes no longer seek mine; there is war between 
us ; there is hate in him and fear in me. 

All the old abuses in society, the great and universal and 
the petty and particular, all unjust accumulations of property 
and power, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an 
instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. 
One thing he always teaches, that there is rottenness where 
he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not 
well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our 
property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes 
are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered 
over government and property. That obscene bird is not 
there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs which must 
be revised. 

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which in- 
stantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. 
The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the 
awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every generous 
soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and 
vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the balance of justice 
through the heart and mind of man. 

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is 
best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man 
often pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs 



100 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in his own debt. Has a man gained any thing who has re- 
ceived a hundred favors and rendered none ? Has he gained 
by borrowing, through indolence or cunning, his neighbor's 
wares, or horses, or money? There arises on the deed the 
instant acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of 
debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferiority. 
The transaction remains in the memory of himself and his 
neighbor; and every new transaction alters according to its 
nature their relation to each other. He may soon come to 
see that he had better have broken his own bones than to 
have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that " the highest 
price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it." 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and 
know that it is always the part of prudence to face every 
claimant and pay every just demand on your time, your 
talents, or your heart. Always pay; for first or last you 
must pay your entire debt. Persons and events may stand 
for a time between you and justice, but it is only a postpone- 
ment. You must pay at last your own debt. If you are wise 
you will dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. 
Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit which 
you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who confers the 
most benefits. He is base, — and that is the one base thing 
in the universe, — to receive favors and render none. In 
the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those frorr 
whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit wt 
receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deec\j 
cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good stay / 
ing in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worm./ 
Pay it away quickly in some sort. 

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapen 
says the prudent, is the dearest labor. What we buy in 
broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some application of go-' 
sense to a common want. It is best to pay in your land < 
skilful gardener, or to buy good sense applied to gardenin . 
in your sailor, good sense applied to navigation ; in the hou 
good sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your age 
good sense applied to accounts and affairs. So do yi 
multiply your presence, or spread yourself throughout yc 
estate. But because of the dual constitution of things, 



I 






COMPENSATION 101 

labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from 
himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price 
of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit 
are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counter- 
feited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, 
knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen. 
These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions 
of the mind; and in obedience to pure motives. The cheat, 
the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the benefit, cannot 
extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which 
his honest care and pains yield to the operative. The law 
of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power; 
but they who do not the thing have not the power. 

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharpening 
of a stake to the construction of a city or an epic, is one im- 
mense illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. 
Everywhere and always this law is sublime. The absolute 
balance of Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has 
its price, and if that price is not paid, not that thing but 
something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get 
anything without its price, is not less sublime in the columns 
of a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of 
light and darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. 
I cannot doubt that the high laws which each man sees 
ever implicated in those processes with which he is conver- 
sant, the stern ethics which sparkle on his chisel-edge, 
which are measured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which 
stand as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the 
history of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, and 
though seldom named, exalt his business to his imagination. 

The league between virtue and nature engages all things 
to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and 
substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He 
finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but 
there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit 
a crime, and the earth is made of glass. There is no such 
thing as concealment. Commit a crime, and it seems as if 
a coat of snow fell on 'the ground, such as reveals in the 
woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and 
mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe 

G HCV 



102 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to 
leave no inlet or clew. Always some damning circumstance 
transpires. The laws and substances of nature, water, snow, 
wind, gravitation, become penalties to the thief. 

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for 
all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is 
mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic II 
equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire h 
turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do H 
him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napo-i] 
leon, when he approached cast down their colors and from!, 
enemies became friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as sick- N 
ness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors. 

Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave and power and deity, ' 

Yet in themselves are nothing. 

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect, j 
As no man had ever a point of pride that was not in- p 1 
jurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not'; 
somewhere made useful to him. The stag in the fable I 
admired his horns and blamed his feet, but when the hunter j! 
came, his feet saved him, and afterwards, caught in thefl 
thicket, his horns destroyed him. Every man in his lifetime 1 
needs to thank his faults. As no man thoroughly understands 
a truth until first he has contended against it, so no man has fl 
a thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of | 
men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph | 
of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a jr 
defect of temper that unfits him to live in society ? Thereby 
he is driven to entertain himself alone and acquire habits 
of self-help ; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends ) 
his shell with pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. Not until we 
are pricked and stung and sorely shot at, awakens the in- 
dignation which arms itself with secret forces. A great i 
man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the I* 
cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, ;' 
tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something ; he ) 
has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained 
facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of con- 



COMPENSATION 103 

ceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man al- 
ways throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is 
more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. The 
wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a dead skin 
and when they would triumph, lo ! he has passed on invul- 
nerable. Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended 
in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against 
me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as 
honied words of praise are spoken for me I feel as one that 
lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil 
to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sand- 
wich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the 
enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength 
of the temptation we resist. 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect 
and enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. 
Bolts and bars are not the best of our institutions, nor is 
shrewdness in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their 
life long under the foolish superstition that they can be 
cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by 
any one but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the 
same time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains. 
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the guaranty 
of the fulfilment of every contract, so that honest service 
cannot come to loss. If you serve an ungrateful master, serve 
him the more. Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall 
be repaid. The longer the payment is withholden, the better 
for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the 
rate and usage of this exchequer. 

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to 
cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope 
of sand. It makes no difference whether the actors be many 
or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies 
voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason and traversing 
its work. The mob is a man voluntarily descending to the 
nature of the beast. Its fit hour of activity is night. Its 
actions are insane, like its whole constitution. It persecutes 
a principle ; it would whip a right ; it would tar and feather 
justice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses and 
persons of those who have these. It resembles the prank of. 



104 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

boys, who run with fire-engines to put out the ruddy aurora 
streaming to the stars. The inviolate spirit turns their spite 
against the wrongdoers. The martyr cannot be dishonored. 
Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison 
a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house en- 
lightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word 
reverberates through the earth from side to side. The minds 
of men are at last aroused; reason looks out and justifies 
her own and malice finds all her work in vain. It is the 
whipper who is whipped and the tyrant who is undone. 

Thus do all things preach the indiff erency of circumstances. 
The man is all. Every thing has two sides, a good and an 
evil. Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. 
But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of in- 
differency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these repre- 
sentations, — What boots it to do well? there is one event 
to good and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; 
if I lose any good I gain some other; all actions are in-' 
different. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to 
wit, its own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but 
a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of cir- 
cumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, 
lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Existence, or God, 
is not a relation or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast 
affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallow- 
ing up all relations, parts and times within itself. Nature, 
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the ab- 
sence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may 
indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which as a back- ' 
ground the living universe paints itself forth ; but no fact i 
is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot 
work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inas- 
much as it is worse not to be than to be. 

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, \ 
because the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy and'* 
does not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible! 
nature. There is no stunning confutation of his nonsense 
before men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the 



COMPENSATION 105 

law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie with 
him he so far decreases from nature. In some manner there 
will be a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding 
also; but, should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes 
square the eternal account. 

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of 
rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty 
to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions 
of being. In a virtuous action I properly am; in a virtuous 
act I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from 
Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding on the 
limits of the horizion. There can be no excess to love, none 
to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are con- 
sidered in the purest sense. The soul refuses all limits. It 
affirms in man always an Optimism, never a Pessimism. 

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct 
is trust. Our instinct uses " more " and " less " in applica- 
tion to man, always of the presence of the soul, and not of 
its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward; the 
true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, 
than the fool and knave. There is therefore no tax on the 
good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God himself, 
or absolute existence, without any comparative. All ex- 
ternal good has its tax, and if it came without desert or 
sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it 
away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may be 
had if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor 
which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to 
meet a good I do not earn, for example to find a pot of buried 
gold, knowing that it brings with it new responsibility. I 
do not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, nor 
honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the 
tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that 
the compensation exists and that it is not desirable to dig 
up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. 
I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. L learn the 
wisdom of St. Bernard, Nothing can work me damage ex- 
cept myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, 
and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault." 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the in- 



106 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

equalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems 
to be the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not 
feel the pain; how not feel indignation or malevolence 
towards More? Look at those who have less faculty, and 
one feels sad and knows not well what to make of it. Al- 
most he shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God. 
What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But see 
the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities vanish. 
Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea. 
The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of 
His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother and 
my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by 
great neighbors, I can get love; I can still receive; and he 
that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby 
I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting 
for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so 
admired and envied is my own. It is the eternal nature 
of the soul to appropriate and make all things its own. 
Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by 
love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious 
domain. His virtue, — is not that mine? His wit, — if it 
cannot be made mine, it is not wit. 

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes 
which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are 
advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Evermore 
it is the order of nature to grow, and every soul is by this 
intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its 
friends and home and laws and faith, as the shellfish crawls 
out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer 
admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In 
proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions 
are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant 
and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, be- 
coming as it were a transparent fluid membrane through 
which the living form is always seen, and not, as in most 
men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates and 
of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. 
Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day 
scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should 
be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of 



COMPENSATION 107 

dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment 
day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not 
advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expan- 
sion, this growth comes by shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our 
angels go. We do not see that they only go out that arch- 
angels may come in. We are idolators of the old. We do 
not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity 
and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force 
in to-day to rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. We 
linger in the ruins of the old tent where once we had 
bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can 
feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught 
so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. 
The voice of the Almighty saith, " Up and onward forever- 
more ! " We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we 
rely on the New; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, 
eyes, like those monsters who look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent 
to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A 
fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, 
a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and un- 
payable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force 
that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, 
brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, some- 
what later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it 
commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates 
an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be 
closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or 
style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more 
friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains 
the formation of new acquaintances and the reception of 
new influences that prove of the first importance to the next 
years; and the man or woman who would have remained a 
sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too 
much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls 
and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the 
forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods 
of men. 




FRIENDSHIP 

(i8 4 i) 

E have a great deal more kindness than is ever 
spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like 
east winds the world, the whole human family is 
bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many 
persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom 
yet we honor, and who honor us ! How many we see in the 
street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we 
warmly rejoice to be with ! Read the language of these wan- 
dering eye-beams. The heart knoweth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a 
certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common 
speech the emotions of benevolence and complacency which 
are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of 
fire ; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheer- 
ing, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest de- 
gree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good will, 
they make the sweetness of life. 

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affec- 
tion. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of 
meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or 
happy expression ; but it is necessary to write a letter to a 
friend, — and forthwith troops of gentle thoughts invest them- 
selves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house 
where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which 
the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger 
is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleas- 
ure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His ar- 
rival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would wel- 
come him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their 
places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must 

109 



110 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only 
the good report is told by others, only the good and new is 
heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we 
wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we 
should stand related in conversation and action with such a 
man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts con- 
versation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We 
have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb 
devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can 
continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, 
drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who 
sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a 
lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the 
stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his 
defects into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard 
the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is 
no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are 
old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the 
order, the dress and the dinner, — but the throbbing of the 
heart and the communications of the soul, no more. 

Pleasant are these jets of affection which make a young 
world for me again. Delicious is a just and firm encounter 
of two, in a thought, in a feeling. How beautiful, on their 
approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the 
gifted and the true ! The moment we indulge our affections, 
the earth is metamorphosed : there is no winter and no night : 
all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, — all duties even ; nothing fills 
the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved 
persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the uni- 
verse it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and 
cheerful alone for a thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my 
friends, the .old and the new. Shall I not call God the 
Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? 
I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so un- 
grateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble- 
minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears 
me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for 
all time: Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy 
several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, 



FRIENDSHIP 111 

a new web of relations ; and, as many thoughts in succession 
substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand in a new 
world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and 
pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to 
me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest 
right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, 
or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them, both deride 
and cancel the thick walls of individual character, relation, 
age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and 
now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent 
lovers, who carry out the world for me to a new and noble 
depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These 
are not stark and stiffened persons, but the new-born poetry 
of God, — poetry without stop, — hymn, ode and epic, poetry 
still flowing and not yet caked in dead books with annotation 
and grammar, but Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will 
these too separate themselves from me again, or some of 
them ? I know not, but I fear it not ; for my relation to them 
is so pure that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of 
my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its 
energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, 
wherever I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. 
It is almost dangerous to me to " crush the sweet poison of 
misused wine " of the affections. A new person is to me al- 
ways a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have had 
such fine fancies lately about two or three persons which 
have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; 
it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is 
very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's ac- 
complishments as if they were mine, — wild, delicate, throb- 
bing property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is 
praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged 
maiden. We overestimate the conscience of our friend. His 
goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his 
temptations less. Every thing that is his, his name, his form, 
his dress, books and instruments, fancy enhances. Our own 
thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. 

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without 
their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like 



112 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The 
lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily 
that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friend- 
ship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. 
We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which 
he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we 
have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictaess, the soul 
does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science 
all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite re- 
moteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by facing the fact; 
by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian 
temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I 
am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their 
essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though 
it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the 
plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and 
festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the pro- 
duction of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though 
it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man 
who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently 
of himself. He is conscious of a universal success, even 
though bought by uniform particular failures. No advan- 
tages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for 
him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than 
on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tanta- 
mount to mine. Only the star dazzles ; the planet has a faint, 
moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts 
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that, 
for all his purple cloaks, I shall not like him, unless he is at 
last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that 
the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its 
pied and painted immensity, — thee also, compared with whom 
all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Jus- 
tice is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. 
Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing 
thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends 
as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germina- 
tion of new buds, extrudes the old leaf ? The law of nature 
is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces 
the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it 



FRIENDSHIP 113 

may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude ; and it 
goes alone for a season that it my exalt its conversation or 
society. This method betrays itself along the whole history 
of our personal relations, the instinct of affection revives 
the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of 
insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes 
his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record 
his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each 
new candidate for his love. 

Dear Friend : If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, 
sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think 
again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am 
not very wise : my moods are quite attainable : and I respect 
thy genius : it is to me as yet unf athomed ; yet dare I not pre- 
sume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to 
me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity 
and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to 
weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short 
and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture 
of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human 
heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere and eternal, 
of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we 
have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden 
sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole gar- 
den of God, which many summers and many winters must 
ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulter- 
ate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In 
vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, 
as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry 
into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All 
association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the 
very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful 
natures disappears as they approach each other. What a 
perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtu- 
ous and gifted ! After interviews have been compassed with 
long foresight we must be tormented presently by baffled 
blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit 



114 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and of animal spirits, in the hey-dey of friendship and 
thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties 
are relieved by solitude. 

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no differ- 
ence how many friends I have and what content I can find 
in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not 
equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, instantly 
the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I 
should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my 

asylum. 

The valiant warrior famoused for fight, 
After a hundred victories, once foiled, 
Is from the book of honor razed quite 
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled. 

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and 
apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is 
protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it 
knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough 
to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which 
hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration 
in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The 
good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of 
rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for 
levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this 
childish luxury in our regards; but the austerest worth; let 
us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth 
of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of 
his foundations. 

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and 
I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, 
to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of 
absolute, and which even leaves the language of love sus- 
picious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is 
so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with 
roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass 
threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know. For 
now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of 
nature or of ourselves ? Not one step has man taken toward 
the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one con- 



FRIENDSHIP 115 

demnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But 
the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this 
alliance with my brother's soul is the nut itself whereof all 
nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is 
the house that shelters a friend ! It might well be built, 
like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. 
Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor 
its law ! It is no idle bond, no holiday engagement. He who 
offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like 
an Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the 
world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contest 
where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone 
is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to pre- 
serve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of 
all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, 
but all the hap in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness 
and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go 
to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I 
can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either 
should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person 
with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. 
I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and 
equal that I may drop even those most undermost garments 
of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men 
never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity 
and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. 
Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, 
only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, 
as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every 
man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, 
hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our 
fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by 
affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred 
folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy 
cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and com- 
monplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he en- 
countered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first 
he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But per- 
sisting as indeed he could not help doing for some time in 
this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every 



116 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No 
man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting 
him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But 
every man was constrained by so much sincerity to face him, 
and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth 
he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us so- 
ciety shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. 
To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth 
a fit of insanity, is it not ? We can seldom go erect. Almost 
every man we meet requires some civility, requires to be 
humored; — he has some fame, some talent, some whim of 
religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be ques- 
tioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a 
friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but 
me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring 
me to stoop, or to lisp, or to mask myself. A friend therefore 
is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see 
nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal 
evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, 
in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign 
form ; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece 
of nature. 

The other element of friendship is Tenderness. We are 
holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by 
fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by 
every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce 
believe that so much character can subsist in another as to 
draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure 
that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes 
dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very 
little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. 
And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remem- 
ber. My author says, " I offer myself faintly and bluntly to 
those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him 
to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that friendship 
should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must 
plant itself on the ground, before it walks over the moon. 
I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. 
We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. 
It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neigh- 



FRIENDSHIP 117 

borhood; it watches with the siek; it holds the pall at the 
funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility 
of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under 
this disguise of a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot 
forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not 
substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues .of justice, 
punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the 
name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. 
I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-pedlars to 
the silken and perfumed amity which only celebrates its days 
of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle 
and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a 
commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; 
more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for 
aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of 
life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts 
and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, 
shipwreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps company with 
the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to 
dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man's 
life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It 
should never fall into something usual and settled, but should 
be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what 
was drudgery. 

For perfect friendship may be said to require natures so 
rare and costly, so well tempered each and so happily 
adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for even in that par- 
ticular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be al- 
together paired), that very seldom can its satisfaction be 
realized. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of 
those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, be- 
twixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, 
perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship 
as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of 
godlike men and women variously related to each other and 
between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this 
law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is 
the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix 
waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You 
shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times 

h hcv 



118 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

with two several men, but let all three of you come together 
and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two 
may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a 
conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good 
company there is never such discourse between two, across 
the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good 
company the individuals at once merge their egotism into a 
social soul exactly coextensive with the several conscious- 
nesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no 
fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there 
pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who 
can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly 
limited to his own. Now this convention, which good 
sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversa- 
tion, which requires an absolute running of two souls 
into one. 

No two men but being left alone with each other enter 
into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines 
which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to 
each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. 
We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if 
it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conver- 
sation is an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is re- 
puted to have thought and eloquence ; he cannot, for all that, 
say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his si- 
lence with as much reason as they would blame the insig- 
nificance of a dial in 4;he shade. In the sun it will mark the 
hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain 
his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and 
unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of 
consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end 
of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by 
a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally baulked 
by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an 
-instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, 
is that the not mine is mine. It turns the stomach, it blots 
the daylight; where I looked for a manly furtherance or at 
least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better 
be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The 



FRIENDSHIP 119 

condition which high friendship demands is ability to do 
without it. To be capable that high office requires great 
and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there 
can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, for- 
midable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet 
they recognise the deep identity which, beneath these dis- 
parities, unites them. 

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous. He 
must be so to know its law. He must be one who is sure 
that greatness and goodness are always economy. He must 
be one who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. 
Let him not dare to intermeddle with this. Leave to the 
diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births 
of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. 
We must not be wilful, we must not provide. We talk of 
choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Rever- 
ence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. 
Of course if he be a man he has merits that are not yours, 
and that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close 
to your person. Stand aside. Give those merits room. Let 
them mount and expand. Be not so much his friend that 
you can never know his peculiar energies, like fond mammas 
who shut up their boy in the house until he is almost grown 
a girl. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of 
his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger 
in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the 
holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a 
friend as property, and to suck a short and ill-confounding 
pleasure, instead of the pure nectar of God. 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. 
Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by in- 
truding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations 
with your friend ? Why go to his house, or know his mother 
and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your 
own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave 
this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A 
message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, 
but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and 
neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should 
not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal 



120 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is 
profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps 
on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides 
the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. 
That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien 
and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather 
fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities. Wish him 
not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard 
him as thy great counterpart; have a princedom to thy 
friend. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, 
untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency 
to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, 
the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is 
too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I 
receive a letter. That seems to you a little. Me it suffices. 
It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to 
receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart 
will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out 
the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of 
heroism have yet made good. 

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to 
prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its open- 
ing. We must be our own before we can be another's. 
There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the 
Latin proverb; you can speak to your accomplice on even 
terms. Crimen quos inquinat, cequat. To those whom we 
admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect 
of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. 
There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never 
mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the ; 
whole world. 

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what 
grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear 
the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set 
you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, 
or to say anything to such? No matter how ingenious, no 
matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable de- 
grees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to 
be frivolous. Wait, and thy soul shall speak. Wait until 
the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day 



FRIENDSHIP 121 

and night avail themselves of your lips. The only money 
of God is God. He pays never with any thing less, or any 
thing else. The only reward of virtue is virtue : the only 
way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer 
a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only 
flees the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true 
glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel 
us; why should we intrude? Late, — very late, — we perceive 
that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or 
habits of society would be of any avail to establish us in such 
relations with them as we desire, — but solely the uprise of 
nature in us to the same degree it is in them : then shall 
we meet as water with water : and if we should not meet 
them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. 
In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man's 
own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes ex- 
changed names with their friends, as if they would signify 
that in their friend each loved his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course 
the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk 
alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams 
and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful 
heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, 
souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love 
us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves 
that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and of 
shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men 
we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be ad- 
monished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of 
friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. 
Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances 
which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though 
you forfeit the little you gain the great. You become pro- 
nounced. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself 
out of the reach of false relations, and draw to you the 
first-born of the world, — those rare pilgrims whereof only 
one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the 
vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, 
as if so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever cor- 



122 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

rection of our popular views we make from insight, nature 
will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us 
of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel if 
we will the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that 
we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, 
or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will 
call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The 
persons are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment 
of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this 
idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even 
bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying " Who 
are you ? Unhand me : I will be dependent no more." Ah ! 
seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet 
again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's 
because we are more our own ? A friend is Janus-faced : he 
looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my 
foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come. He is the 
harbinger of a greater friend. It is the property of the 
divine to be reproductive. 

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would 
have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. 
We must have society on our own terms, and admit or 
exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak 
much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so great 
that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, pre- 
sentiments hover before me, far before me, in the firmament. 
I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may 
seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only 
that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now 
they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I. 
prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study 
their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a 
certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual 
astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sym- 
pathies with you ; but then I know well I shall mourn always 
the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I 
shall have languid times, when I can well afford to occupy 
myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost 
literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. 
But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with 



! 



FRIENDSHIP 123 

new visions; not with yourself but with your lustres, and 
I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. 
So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I 
will receive from them not what they have but what they 
are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot 
give me, but which emanates from them. But they shall 
not hold me by any relations less subtle and pure. We will 
meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted 
not. 

/it has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to 
carry a friendship greatly on one side, without due corre- 
spondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with 
the poor fact that the receiver is not capacious ? It never 
troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain 
into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting 
planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold com- 
panion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away; but 
thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate 
for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of 
the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. 
But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. 
True love transcends instantly the unworthy object and 
dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor inter- 
posed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much 
earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things 
may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the rela- 
tion. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total mag- 
nanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for in- 
firmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both. 



HEROISM 

(i8 4 i) 

Paradise is under the shadow of swords. 

— Mahomet. 

IN the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays 
of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant recog- 
nition of gentility,' as if a noble behavior were as easily 
marked in the society of their age as color is in our Amer- 
ican population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio 
enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or governor ex- 
claims, " This is a gentleman," and proffers civilities without 
end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with 
this delight in personal advantages there is in their plays 
a certain heroic cast of character and dialogue, — as in Bon- 
duca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double Marriage, — 
wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such 
deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest 
additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. 
Among many texts take the following. The Roman Martius 
has conquered Athens, — all but the invincible spirits of 
Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The 
beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save 
her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although 
assured that a word will save him, and the execution of 
both proceeds : — 

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell. 

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, 
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown, 
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste. 

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight; 
Let not soft nature so transformed be, 
And lose her gentler sexed humanity, 
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 't is well; 
Never one object underneath the sun 

125 



126 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Will I behold before my Sophocles : 
Farewell ; now teach the Romans how to die. 

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die? 

Soph. Thou dost not, Martius, 
And, therefore, not what 't is to live ; to die 
Is to begin to live. It is to end 
An old, stale, weary work and to commence 
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave 
Deceitful knaves for the society 
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part 
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, 
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do. 

Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus? 

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent 
To them I ever loved best? Now I'll kneel, 
But with my back toward thee : 't is the last duty 
This trunk can do the gods. 

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, 
Or Martius', heart will leap out at his mouth. 
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord, 
And live with all the freedom you were wont. 
O love ! thou doubly hast afflicted me 
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart, 
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, 
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety. 

Val. What ails my brother? 

Soph. Martius, O Martius, 
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me. 

Dor. O star of Rome ! what gratitude can speak 
Fit words to follow such a deed as this? 

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, 
With his disdain of fortune and of death, 
Captived himself, has captivated me, 
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here, 
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul. 
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think ; 
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved, 
Then we have vanquished nothing ; he is free, 
And Martius walks now in captivity. 

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel 
or oration that our press vents in the last few years, which 
goes to the same tune. We have a great many flutes and 
flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet Words- 
worth's " Laodamia," and the ode of " Dion," and some 
sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will some- 
times draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given 
by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural 



HEROISM 127 

taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered 
no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical 
and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given 
us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an 
account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read, 
And Simon Ockley's History of the Saracens recounts the 
prodigies of individual valor, with admiration all the more 
evident on the part of the narrator that he seems to think 
that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some 
proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the 
literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, 
who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasi- 
das, the Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I 
must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to 
all the ancient writers. Each of his " Lives " is a refutation 
to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and 
political theorists. A wild courage, a stoicism not of the 
schools but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has 
given that book its immense fame. 

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than 
books of political science or of private economy. Life is a 
festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney- 
side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. 
The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and 
our contemporaries are punished in us also. The disease 
and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, 
intellectual and moral laws, and often violation on violation 
to breed such compound misery. A lockjaw that bends a 
man's head back to his heels; hydrophobia that makes him 
bark at his wife and babes; insanity that makes him eat 
grass ; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain fe- 
rocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, 
must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily almost 
no man exists who has not in his own person become to some 
amount a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable 
to a share in the expiation. 

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the 
man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state 
of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being 
require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, 



128 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading 
the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, 
and with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by 
the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his 
behavior. 

Towards all this external evil the man within the breast 
assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope 
single-handed with the infinite army of enemies. To this 
military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism. 
Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which 
makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which 
slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its 
energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The 
hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can 
shake his will, but pleasantly and as it were merrily he ad- 
vances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the 
tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat 
not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in 
it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture 
with it; it hath pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. 
Nevertheless we must profoundly revere it. There is some- 
what in great actions which does not allow us to go behind 
them. Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is 
always right; and although a different breeding, different 
religion and greater intellectual activity would have modi- 
lied or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero 
that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to 
the sensure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of 
the unschooled man that he finds a quality in him that is 
negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, 
of reproach, and that he knows that his will is higher and 
more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists. 

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind 
and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great 
and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of 
an individual's character. Now to no other man can its 
wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be 
supposed to see a little farther on his own proper path than 
any one else. Therefore just and wise men take umbrage 
at his act, until after some little time be past : then they see 



HEROISM 129 

it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that 
the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity ; for every 
heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external 
good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the 
prudent also extol. 

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the 
soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance 
of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can 
be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth and it is 
just. It is generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty 
calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists ; it 
is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be 
wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That 
false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the foil, 
the butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, 
is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say then to 
the sugar-plums and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, 
quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all human 
society? What joys has kind nature provided for us dear 
creatures ! There seems to be no interval between great- 
ness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the 
world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great 
hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, 
is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on 
his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, 
setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with 
a little gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot 
choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. " Indeed, these 
humble considerations make me out of love with greatness. 
What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs 
of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that 
were the peach-colored ones ; or to bear the inventory of thy 
shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use." 

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider 
the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, 
reckon narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display: 
the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unseasonable 
economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the 
God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn 
Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme 



130 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. "When I was in 
Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of 
which were open and fixed back to the wall with large 
nails. I asked the reason, and was told that the house had 
not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years. Strangers 
may present themselves at any hour and in whatever number ; 
the master has amply provided for the reception of the men 
and their animals and is never happier than when they tarry 
for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other 
country." The magnanimous know very well that they 
who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger, — so it 
be done for love and not for ostentation, — do, as it were, put 
God under obligation to them, so perfect are the compen- 
sations of the universe. In some way the time they seem 
to lose is redeemed and the pains they seem to take re- 
munerate themselves. These men fan the flame of human 
love and raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. 
But hospitality must be for service and not for show, or 
it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high 
to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It 
gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can 
lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong 
to city feasts. 

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish 
to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves 
it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth 
his while to be solemn and denounce with bitterness flesh- 
eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or 
lea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he 
dines, how he dresses, but without railing or precision his 
living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, 
drank water, and said of wine, " It is a noble, generous liquor 
and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, 
water was made before it." Better still is the temperance 
of King David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord 
the water which three of his warriors had brought him to 
drink, at the peril of their lives. 

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after 
the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides, " O 
Virtue ! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee 



HEROISM 131 

at last but a shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by 
this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its 
nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. 
The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is 
enough. Poverty is its ornament. Plenty does not need it, 
and can very well abide its loss. 

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, 
is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height 
to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to 
dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, suc- 
cess, and life at so cheap a rate that they will not soothe 
their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear 
their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with pecu- 
lation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait 
for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in 
his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Soc- 
rates's condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor 
in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More's 
playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beau- 
mont and Fletcher's " Sea Voyage," Juletta tells the stout 
captain and his company, — 

Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye. 
Master. Very likely, 

'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye. 

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and 
glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to 
take any thing seriously; all must be as gay as the song of 
a canary, though it were the building of cities or the eradi- 
cation of old and foolish churches and nations which have 
cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts 
put all the history and customs of this world behind them, 
and play their 'own play in innocent defiance of the Blue- 
Laws of the world; and such would appear, could we see 
the human race assembled in vision, like little children 
frolicking together, though to the eyes of mankind at large 
they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences. 
The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of 
a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under 
his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main 
fact to our purpose. All these great and transcendent prop- 



132 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

erties are ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, 
the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the 
same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest in our 
small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to dis- 
abuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, 
with number and size. Why should these words", Athenian, 
Roman, Asia and England, so tingle in the ear?/ Let us feel 
that where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods so- 
journ, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, 
Connecticut River and Boston Bay you think paltry places, 
and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. 
But here we are : — that is a great fact, and, if we will tarry 
a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it 
only that thyself is here, — and art and nature, hope and ' 
dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be 
absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas, 
brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus 
to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well 
where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough 
for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet 
of Milton. A great man illustrates his place, makes his 
climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the 
beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is the 
fairest which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The pic- 
tures which fill the imagination in reading the actions of 
Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hlampden, 
teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the 
depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal 
or national splendor, and act on principles that should in- 
terest man and nature in the length of our days. 

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men 
who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life 
was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, 
when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion, 
we admire their superiority ; they seem to throw contempt on 
the whole state of the world; theirs is the tone of a youth- 
ful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter ^ 
an active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to 
the common size of man. The magic they used was the ideal 
tendencies, which always makes the Actual ridiculous; but , 



i 



HEROISM 133 

the tough world has its revenge the moment they put their 
horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no 
example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What 
then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet 
true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day ex- 
ecute their will and put the world to shame. Or why should 
a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, 
because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered 
souls who have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy 
the imagination and the serene Themis, none can, — certainly 
not she. Why not? She has a new and unattempted prob- 
lem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that 
ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely 
on her way, accept the hint of each new experience, try in 
turn all the gifts God offers her that she may learn the 
power and the charm that like a new dawn radiating of the 
deep of space, her new-born being is. The fair girl who 
repels interference by a decided and proud choice of influ- 
ences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty, inspires 
every beholder with somewhat of her nobleness. The 
silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a 
fear. Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. 
Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and 
refined by the vision. 

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. 
All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generos- 
ity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by your- 
self, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the 
world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common 
the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the sym- 
pathy of people in those actions whose excellence is that 
they outrun sympathy and appeal to a tardy justice. If 
you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to 
serve him, do not take back your words when you find that 
prudent people do not commend you. Be true to your own 
act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something 
strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a 
decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given 
to a young person, " Always do what you are afraid to 
do." A simple manly character need never make an apology, 

I HCV 






134 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

but should regard its past action with the calmness of 
Phocion, when he admitted that the event of the battle was 
happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from the battle. 

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot 
find consolation in the thought, — this is a part of my con- 
stitution, part of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. 
Has nature covenanted with me that I should never appear 
to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure? Let us be 
generous of our dignity as well as of our money. /Greatness 
once and for ever has done with opinion. / We tell our char- 
ities, not because we wish to be praised fdr them, not because 
we think they have great merit, but for our justification. It 
is a capital blunder; as you discover when another man 
recites his charities. 

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with 
some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, 
seems to be an asceticism which common good nature would 
appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that 
they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering 
men. And not only need we breathe and exercise the soul 
by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, 
of unpopularity, but it behooves the wise man to look with 
a bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade 
men, and to familiarize himself with disgusting forms of 
disease, with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent 
death. 

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the 
day never shines in which this element may not work. The 
circumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat 
better in this country and at this hour than perhaps ever 
before. More freedom exists for culture. It will now run 
against an axe at the first step out of the beaten track of 
opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his 
edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, 
and the trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the 
other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the 
bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, 
and died when it was better not to live. 

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can 
walk, but to take counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit 






HEROISM 135 

too much association, let him go home much, and stablish 
himself in those courses he approves. The unremitting re- 
tention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties is 
hardening the character to that temper which will work 
with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. 
Whatever outrages have happened to men may befall a man 
again : and very easily in a republic, if there appear any 
signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar and 
feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home 
to his mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and 
inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such 
penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a 
sufficient' number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions 
incendiary. 

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most 
susceptible heart to see how quick a bound Nature has set 
to the utmost infliction of malice. We rapidly approach a 
brink over which no enemy can follow us. 

Let them rave : 
Thou art quiet in thy grave. 

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour 
when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy 
them who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavor? 
Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly con- 
gratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in 
his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in his 
grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? 
Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who 
are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, 
and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his 
own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that 
will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made 
death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of 
the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being. 



THE OVER-SOUL 

(.8+1) 

But souls that of his own good life partake, 
He loves as his own self ; dear as his eye 
They are to Him : He'll never them forsake : 
When they shall die, then God himself shall die : 
They live, they live in blest eternity. 

— Henry More. 

THERE is a difference between one and another hour 
of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our 
faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet 
there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains 
us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other expe- 
riences. For this reason the argument which is always 
forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary 
hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever 
invalid and vain. A mightier hope abolishes despair. We 
give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must 
explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean, but 
how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground 
of this uneasiness of ours*; of this old discontent? What 
is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine 
innuendo by which the great soul makes its enormous claim ? 
Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never 
been written, but always he is leaving behind what you 
have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of meta- 
physics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years 
has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. 
In its experiments there has always remained, in the last 
analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream 
whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending 
into us from we know not whence. The most exact cal- 
culator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may 

137 



138 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

not baulk the very next moment. I am constrained every 
moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the 
will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that 
flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a 
season its streams into me, — I see that I am a pensioner, — 
not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; 
that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of 
reception, but from some alien energy the visions come. 

The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past and the 
present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that 
great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft 
arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within 
which every man's particular being is contained and made 
one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere 
conversation is the worship, to which all right action is 
submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our 
tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what 
he is, and to speak from his character and not from his 
tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and 
hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. 
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Mean- 
time within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; 
the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is 
equally related; the eternal One. And this deep power in 
which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, 
is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the 
act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, 
the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece 
by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but 
the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. 
Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of 
the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, 
by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in 
every man that we can know what it saith. Every man's 
words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those 
who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I 
dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august 
sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire 
whom it will, and behold ! their speech shall be lyrical, and 






THE OVER-SOUL 139 

sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, 
even by profane words, if sacred I may not use, to indicate 
the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have 
collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the 
Highest Law. 

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, 
in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instruc- 
tions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in mas- 
querade, — the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing 
a real element and forcing it on our distinct notice, — we 
shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into 
knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that 
the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises 
all the organs ; is not a function, like the power of memory, 
of calculation, of comparison, — but uses these as hands and 
feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the 
will, but the master of the intellect and the will; — is the 
vast background of our being, in which they lie, — an im- 
mensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From 
within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things 
and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light 
is all. A man is the faqade of a temple wherein all wisdom 
and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the 
eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we 
know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him 
we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would 
he let it appear through his action, would make our knees 
bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; 
when it breathes through his will, it is virtue ; when it flows 
through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the 
intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The 
weakness of the will begins when the individual would be 
something of himself. All reform aims in some one par- 
ticular to let the great soul have its way through us ; in other 
words, to engage us to obey. 

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. 
Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtle. 
It is undefinable, unmeasurable ; but we know that it per- 
vades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being 
is in man. A wise old proverb says, " God comes to see us 



140 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

without bell : " that is, as there is no screen or ceiling be- 
tween our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar 
or wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, 
the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open 
on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to all the at- 
tributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, 
Power. These natures no man ever got above, but always 
they tower over us, and most in the moment when our in- 
terests tempt us to wound them. 

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made 
known by its independency of those limitations which cir- 
cumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribeth all 
things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In 
like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of 
the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that 
degree that the walls of time and space have come to look 
solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of 
these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time 
and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. 
A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports 
with time — * 

Can crowd eternity into an hour, 

Or stretch an hour to eternity. 

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and 
age than that which is measured from the year of our natural 
birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. 
Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal 
beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the 
feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. 
The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in 
a degree from the influences of time. In sickness, in lan- 
guor, give us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and 
we are refreshed; or produce a volume of Plato or Shak- 
speare, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come 
into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine thought 
demolishes centuries and millenniums, and makes itself 
present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less 
effective now than it was when first his mouth was opened? 
The emphasis of facts and persons to my soul has nothing 
to do with time. And so always the soul's scale is one; 






THE OVER-SOUL 141 

the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. 
Before the great revelations of the soul, Time, Space and 
Nature shrink away. In common speech we refer all things 
to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars 
to one concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment 
is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day 
of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the 
like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the 
facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other 
is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now 
esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like ripe 
fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow 
them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures, 
Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, 
or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is 
the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a 
world alway before her, leaving worlds alway behind her. 
She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, 
nor men. The soul knows only the soul; all else is idle 
weeds for her wearing. 

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its 
progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made 
by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a 
straight line, but rather by ascension of state, such as can 
be represented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the 
worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius 
are of a certain total character, that does not advance the 
elect individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard, 
and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority, but by 
every throe of growth the man expands there where he 
works, passing at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. 
With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of 
the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and in- 
spires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have 
always been spoken in the world and becomes conscious of 
a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with the per- 
sons in the house. 

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple 
rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue, but 
into the region of all virtues. They are in the spirit which 



142 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

contains them all. The soul is superior to all the particulars 
of merit. The soul requires purity, but purity is not it; 
requires justice, but justice is not that; requires beneficence, 
but is somewhat better: so that there is a kind of descent 
and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral 
nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. For, to the soul 
in her pure action all the virtues are natural, and not pain- 
fully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes 
suddenly virtuous. 

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual 
growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are capable 
of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, are already on 
a platform that commands the sciences and arts, speech and 
poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral 
beatitude does already anticipate those special powers which 
men prize so highly; just as love does justice to all the 
gifts of the object beloved. The lover has no talent, no 
skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamored 
maiden, however little she may possess of related faculty; 
and the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind 
finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal 
road to particular knowledges and powers. For in ascending 
to this primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from 
our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to 
the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we 
see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow 
effect. 

One mode of the -divine teaching is the incarnation of the 
spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society; 
with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or 
outwardly express a certain obedience to the great instincts 
to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified 
of a common nature; and so these other souls, these sepa- 
rated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me 
the new emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, 
admiration, pity; thence come conversation, competition, 
persuasion, cities and war. Persons are supplementary to 
the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for 
persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. 
But the larger experience of man discovers the identical 



THE OVER-SOUL 143 

nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves 
acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation be- 
tween two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third 
party, to a common nature. That third party or common 
nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in 
groups where debate is earnest, and especially on great ques- 
tions of thought, the company become- aware of their unity ; 
aware that the thought rises to an equal height in all bosoms, 
that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well 
as the sayer. They all wax wiser than they were. It arches 
over them like a temple, this unity of thought in which 
every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and 
thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious 
of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. 
There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to 
the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary 
education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind 
is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, 
think much less of property in truth. Thankfully they accept 
it everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man's 
name, for it is theirs long beforehand. It is theirs from eter- 
nity. The learned and the studious of thought have no 
monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some 
degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many 
valuable observations to people who are not very acute or 
profound, and who say the thing without effort which we 
want and have long been hunting in vain. The action of 
the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than 
in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over 
every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each 
other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess 
ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much 
more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial con- 
versation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each 
of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from 
behind each of us. 

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service 
to the world, for which they forsake their native nobleness, 
they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean 
houses and effect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity 



144 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their 
interior and guarded retirements. 

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of 
life. It is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing 
with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments 
and my money stead me nothing. They are all lost on him: 
but as much soul as I have, avails. If I am merely wilful, 
he gives me a Rowland for an Oliver, sets his will against 
mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation 
of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I re- 
nounce my will and act for the soul, setting that up as 
umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same 
soul; he reveres and loves with me. 

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know 
truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they 
choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken 
what they do not wish to hear, " How do you know it is truth, 
and not an error of your own ? " We know truth when 
we see it, ' from opinion, as we know when we are awake 
that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel 
Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of 
that man's perception, — " It is no proof of a man's under- 
standing to be able to affirm whatever he pleases; but to be 
able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is 
false is false, this is the mark and character of intelligence." 
In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as every 
truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought 
which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, sepa- 
rating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we 
know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but 
will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we 
know the particular thing, and every thing, and every 
man. For the Maker of all things and all persons 
stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through 
us over things. 

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular pas- 
sages of the individual's experience, it also reveals truth. 
And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very 
presence, and to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that 
advent. For the soul's communication of truth is the high- 



Emerson 's Library at Concord 

from a painting 

by Miss E. W. Roberts 

{Photogravure by Gilbo) 





1 1 i » ' 



- U '«V;H ! 



:'.iX' 







THE OVER-SOUL 145 

est event in nature, for it then does not give somewhat from 
itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that 
man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth 
he receives, it takes him to itself. 

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its mani- 
festations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These 
are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this 
communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our 
mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the 
flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehen- 
sion of this central commandment agitates men with awe 
and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception 
of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, 
which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communi- 
cations the power to see is not separated from the will 
to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the 
obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment 
when the individual feels himself invaded by it, is memorable. 
Always, I believe, by the necessity of our constitution a cer- 
tain enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of that 
divine presence. The character and duration of this enthu- 
siasm varies with the state of the individual, from an exstasy 
and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its rarer 
appearance, to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in 
which form it warms, like our household fires, all the 
families and associations of men, and makes society possible. 
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the 
opening of the religious sense in men, as if " blasted with 
excess of light." The trances of Socrates ; the " union " of 
Plotinus ; the vision of Porphyry ; the conversion of Paul ; 
the aurora of Behmen; the convulsions of George Fox and 
his Quakers; the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this 
kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a 
ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, 
been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the 
history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The 
rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the 
internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New 
Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; 
the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that 



146 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul 
always mingles with the universal soul. 

The nature of these revelations is always the same; they 
are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of 
the soul's own questions. They do not answer the questions 
which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by 
words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. 

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular 
notion of a revelation, is, that it is a telling of fortunes. 
In past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find 
answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from 
God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do and 
who shall be their company, adding even names and dates 
and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this 
low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really 
no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a de- 
scription of the countries towards which you sail. The 
description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow 
you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men 
ask of the immortality of the soul, and the employments of 
heaven, and the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even 
dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these inter- 
rogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak 
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the 
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. 
Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual 
fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, never 
made the separation of the idea of duration from the essence 
of these attributes, never uttered a syllable concerning the 
duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever 
duration from the moral elements, and to teach the immor- 
tality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. 
The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately 
taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the 
adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. 
No inspired man ever asks this question or condescends to 
these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man 
in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, 
which is infinite, to a future which would be finite. 

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are 



THE OVER-SOUL 147 

a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No an- 
swer in words can reply to a question of things. It is not 
in an arbitrary " decree of God," but in the nature of man, 
that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow: for the 
soul will not have us read any other cipher but that of cause 
and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs 
the children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of ob- 
taining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego 
all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats 
us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, 
and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for 
itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are 
one. 

Thus is the soul the perceiver and revealer of truth. By 
the same fire, serene, impersonal, perfect, which burns until 
it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an 
ocean of light, — we see and know each other, and what spirit 
each is of. Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of 
the character of the several individuals in his circle of 
friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do not disap- 
point him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he 
put no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, 
authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be 
trusted as one who had an interest in his own character. 
We know each other very well, — which of us has been just 
to himself and whether that which we teach or behold is 
only an aspiration or is our honest effort also. 

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft 
in our life or unconscious power, not in the understanding. 
The whole intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its 
friendships, its quarrels, — is one wide judicial investigation 
of character. In full court, or in small committee, or con- 
fronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer them- 
selves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit those 
decisive trifles by which character is read. But who judges? 
and what? Not our understanding. We do not read them 
by learning or craft. No ; the wisdom of the wise man con- 
sists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets them judge 
themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict. 

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is over- 






148 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

powered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your 
genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which 
we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. 
Thoughts come into our minds through avenues which we 
never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through 
avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character 
teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress 
is found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his 
breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, 
nor all together can hinder him from being deferential to a 
higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home 
in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his 
sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will in- 
voluntarilv confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If 
he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, 
through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial tempera- 
ment, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is 
one, and the tone of having is another. 

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary; 
between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope; between 
philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, — and philoso- 
phers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh and Stewart; between 
men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, 
and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half-insane 
under the infinitude of his thought, is that one class speak 
from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors 
of the fact ; and the other class from without, as spectators 
merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evi- 
dence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from 
without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks al- 
ways from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. 
In that is the miracle. That includes the miracle. My soul 
believes beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand 
continually in the expectation of the appearance of such a 
teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil, 
where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly 
confess it. 

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect and makes 
what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is 
not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no 



THE OVER-SOUL 149 

doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among 
the multitude of scholars and authors we feel no hallowing 
presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than 
of inspiration ; they have a light and know not whence it 
comes and call it their own : their talent is some exaggerated 
faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a 
disease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make 
the impression of virtue, but almost of vice ; and we feel that 
a man's talents stand in the way of his advancement in 
truth, ; But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of 
the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and 
not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom 
of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. 
The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does 
not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in 
Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are 
content with truth. They use the positive degree. They 
seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced 
with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior but 
popular writers. For, they are poets by the free course 
which they allow to the informing soul, which through their 
eyes beholdeth again and blesses the things which it hath 
made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than 
any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own 
wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His 
greatest communication to our mind is to teach us to despise 
all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain 
of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars 
his own ; and we then feel that the splendid works which he 
has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of 
self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than 
the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspira- 
tion which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter 
things as good from day to day for ever. Why then should 
I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the 
soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue? 

This energy does not descend into individual life on any 
other condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly 
and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is 
foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity 

j hcv 



150 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are 
apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that inspira- 
tion the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not 
talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. 
It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller 
attempts to embellish his life by quoting my Lord and the 
Prince and the Countess, who thus said or did to him. The 
ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and 
rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The more 
cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out 
the pleasing, poetic circumstance; the visit to Rome, the 
man of genius they saw; the brilliant friend they know; 
still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape, the moun- 
tain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed yesterday, — 
and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But 
the soul that ascendeth to worship the great God is plain 
and true; has no rose color; no fine friends; no chivalry; no 
adventures ; does not want admiration ; dwells in the hour 
that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day, — 
by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle hav- 
ing become porous to thought and bibulous of the sea of 
light. 

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature 
looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are 
worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap and so things 
of course, that in the infinite riches of the soul it is like 
gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little 
air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmos- 
phere are ours. The mere author in such society is like a 
pickpocket among gentlemen, who has come in to steal a 
gold button or a pin. Nothing can pass there, or make you 
one of the circle, but the casting aside your trappings and 
dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession and 
omniscient affirmation. 

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods 
in the earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, 
your bounty, your virtue even, say rather your act of duty, 
for your virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as them- 
selves, and overroyal, and the father of the gods. But what 
rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flat- 



THE OVER-SOUL 151 

tery with which authors solace each other and wound them- 
selves ! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go 
to see Cromwell and Christina and Charles the II. and James 
I. and the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, 
the fellows of kings, and must feel the servile tone of con- 
versation in the world. They must always be a godsend to 
princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, without 
ducking or concession, and give a high nature the refresh- 
ment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of 
even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them 
wiser and superior men. Souls like these make us feel that 
sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly 
with man and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity 
and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest 
compliment you can pay. Their " highest praising," said 
Milton, " is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind 
of praising." 

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the 
soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships 
God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this 
better and universal self is new and unsearchable. Ever it 
inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to 
man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effac- 
ing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments ! When 
we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our 
god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his pres- 
ence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite 
enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new 
infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. 
He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the 
true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular 
uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation 
of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that 
his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of 
law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal 
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable 
projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he 
cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for 
thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. 
Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not 



152 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not 
find him? for there is a power, which as it is in you, is in 
him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, 
if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to 
go and render a service to which your talent and your taste 
invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it 
not occurred to you that you have no right to go, unless you 
are equally willing to be prevented from going ? O, believe, 
as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round 
world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear. 
Every proverb, every book, every by-word that belongs to 
thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open 
or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic 
will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall 
l lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in 
thee is the heart of all;, not a valve, not a wall, not an 
intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls 
uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as 
the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide 
is one. 

Let men then learn the revelation of all nature and all 
thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells 
with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, 
if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what 
the great God speaketh, he must " go into his closet and shut 
the door," as Jesus said. God will not make himself mani- 
fest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, with- 
drawing himself from all the accents of other men's devotion. 
Their prayers even are hurtful to him, until he have made 
his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of be- 
lievers. Whenever the appeal is made, — no matter how indi- 
rectly, — to numbers, proclamation is then and there made 
that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping 
thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in 
that presence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in j 
perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can , 
Calvin or Swedenborg say? 

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers I 
or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. ■■■ 
The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, 'f 



THE OVER-SOUL 153 

the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to 
Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of 
authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the 
eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, 
it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It always 
believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man 
all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and 
sainted, shrinks away. Before that holy heaven which our 
presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form 
of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we 
have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have 
none ; that we have no history, no record of any character or 
mode of living that entirely contents us. The saints and 
demigods whom history worships we are constrained to ac- 
cept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours 
we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed 
on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and custom- 
ary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, 
original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, 
on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through 
it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but 
it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is 
innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass 
grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent 
on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, 
the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. 
I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do 
overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be but the 
fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and 
more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I 
become public and human in my regards and actions. So 
come I to live in thoughts and act with energies which are 
immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the 
ancients said, that " its beauty is immense," man will come 
to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul 
worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he 
will learn that there is no profane history ; that all history is 
sacred ; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a mo- 
ment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of 
shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He 



154 THE OVER-SOUL 

will cease from what is base and frivolous in his own life 
and be content with all places and any service he can render. 
He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that 
trust which carries God with it and so hath already -the whole 
future in the bottom of the heart. 






CIRCLES 

(1840 

THE eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms 
is the second; and throughout nature this primary 
picture is repeated without end. It is the highest em- 
blem in the .cipher of the world. St. Augustine described 
the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere 
and its circumference nowhere.] We are all our lifetime read- 
ing the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we 
have already deduced in considering the circular or com- 
pensatory character of every human action. Another anal- 
ogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being out- 
done. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around 
every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in 
nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always 
another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a 
lower deep opens. 

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the 
Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of 
man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner 
of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many 
illustrations of human power in every department. 

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid 
and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our 
globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. 
The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture 
is the predominance of an idea which draws after it all 
this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another 
idea; they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted 
away, as if it had been statues of ice : here and there 
a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and 
scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June 
and July. For the genius that created it creates now some- 

155 



156 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



what else. The Greek letters last a little longer, but are al 
ready passing under the same sentence and tumbling into 
the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens 
for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the 
ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the de- 
composition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. 
See the investment of capital in aqueducts, made useless by 
hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, 
by railways ; sails, by steam ; steam, by electricity. 

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts 
of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge 
wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. 
The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better 
than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which 
wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, 
is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect 
of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret 
is known. A rich estate appears to women and children a 
firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out 
of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, 
good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, 
to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed 
than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable 
and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when 
once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so im- 
movably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? 
Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. 
Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls. 

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defy- 
ing though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which 
is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can 
only be reformed by showing him a new idea which com- 
mands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, 
which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides 
outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. 
The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel with- 
out wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the 
individual souL For it is the inert effort of each thought, 
having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, 
as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a 



CIRCLES 157 

religious rite, to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify 
and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it 
bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another 
orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, 
with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart re- 
fuses to be imprisoned ; in its first and narrowest pulses it al- 
ready tends outward with a vast force and to immense and 
innumerable expansions. 

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every 
general law only a particular fact of some more general 
law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no 

' inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes 
his story, — how good ! how final ! how it puts a new face 
on all things ! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side rises 
also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just 
pronounced the outline of the 'sphere. Then already is our 
first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only 
redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. 

| And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which 
haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be 
abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain 
nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder gen- 
eralization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power 
to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of 
the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic 
dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a work- 
man in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should 
be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age. 

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder; the steps are 
actions, the new prospect is power. Every several result 
is threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one 
seems to be contradicted by the new ; it is only limited by the 
new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to 
those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. 
But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are 
effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, 
and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles 
before the revelation of the new hour. 

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass 
and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? 



158 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter 
just as much. 

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. 
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and 
if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine 
soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, 
the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is al- 
ways a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every 
man believes that he has a greater possibility. 

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full 
of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason 
why I should not have the same thought, the same power of 
expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, 
seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday 
I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see 
so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder 
who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas 
for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb 
of a vast flow ! I am God in nature ; I am a weed by the wall. 

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to 
work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's 
relations. We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the 
approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet if I have a 
friend I am tormented by my imperfections. The love of me 
accuses the other party. If he were high enough to slight 
me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new 
heights. A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs 
of his friends. AjFor every friend whom he loses for truth, 
he gains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and 
mused on my friends, why should I play with them this 
game of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not vol- 
untarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and 
worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality 
of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I 
forsake for these, they are not thee ! Every personal con- 
sideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell 
the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure. 

How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to 
interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin 
is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man's 



CIRCLES 159 

limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he 
enterprises? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely al- 
luring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, 
a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it 
a pond, and you care not if you never see it again. 

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seem- 
ingly discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle 
and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. 
A wise man will see that Aristotle Platonizes. By going one 
step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are recon- 
ciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, 
and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher 
vision. 

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this 
planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a con- 
flagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows 
what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of 
science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not 
any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of 
fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very 
hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of 
nations, the manner and morals of mankind are all at the 
mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always 
a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill 
that attends it. 

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man 
cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but 
put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by 
his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth, and 
his alert acceptance of it from whatever quarter ; the intrepid 
conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christi- 
anity, his world, may at any time be superseded and decease. 

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with 
it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see 
in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it 
is true in gleams and fragments. Then, its countenance 
waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true. 
It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that 
God is ; that he is in me ; and that all things are shadows 
of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement 




160 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement 
of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness 
executing and organizing itself. Much more obviously is 
history and the state of the world at any one time directly 
dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in 
the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at 
this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged 
on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order 
of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture 
would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human 
pursuits. 

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we 
pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on 
every side. The parties are not to be judged by the spirit 
they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To- 
morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. 
To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack- 
saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows 
on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, 
emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to 
oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own 
thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to re- 
cover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound 
and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the 
announcement of every truth ! In common hours, society sits 
cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, — knowing, 
possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols 
which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. 
Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, 
and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded 
all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and 
saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts 
which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, — property, cli- 
mate, breeding, personal beauty and the like, have strangely 
changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled 
shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, 
leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet 
here again see the swift circumscription ! Good as is dis- 
course, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the 
discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the 



CIRCLES 161 

speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect under- 
standing in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. 
If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered. 

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through 
which a new one may be described. The use of literature is 
to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of 
our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. We 
fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best 
we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we 
may wiselier see French, English and American houses and 
modes of living. In like manner we see literature best from 
the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from 
a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within 
the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the 
earth's orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star. 

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all 
the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on 
metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or 
the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, 
and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change 
and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the 
new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk 
romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and 
arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain 
of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He 
claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the 
world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight 
path in theory and practice. 

We have the same need to command a view of the religion 
of the world. We can never see Christianity from the cate- 
chism: — from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from 
amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may. Cleansed 
by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beau- 
tiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast 
a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly 
dear to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young 
philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the christian 
church by whom that brave text of Paul's was not specially 
prized, "Then shall also the Son be subject unto Him who 
put all things under him, that God may be all in all." Let 



162 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and 
welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to 
the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against 
the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out of 
the book itself. 

The natural world ma)' - be conceived of as a system of 
concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature 
slight dislocations which apprize us that this surface on 
which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold 
tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these 
metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own 
sake, are means and methods only, are words of God, and 
as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist 
learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms 
and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the 
deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate 
statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods 
which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pur- 
sued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approxi- 
mate also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. 
Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend and 
fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, 
these things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. 
Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. 

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call 
the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. 
The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; 
all his prudence will be so much deduction from his gran- 
deur. But it behoves each to see, when he sacrifices 
prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleas- 
ure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he 
can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged 
chariot instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through, 
the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes ; 
Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither 
is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that 
with every precaution you take against such an evil you 
put yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the 
highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden 
a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think 



CIRCLES 163 

how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calculations 
before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or make 
the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest 
sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and 
the low have their way of expressing the last facts of phi- 
losophy as well as you. " Blessed be nothing " and " The 
worse things are, the better they are " are proverbs which 
express the transcendentalism of common life. 

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty 
another's ugliness ; one man's wisdom another's folly ; as one 
beholds the same objects from a higher point of view. One 
man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no meas- 
ure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this 
duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second 
man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself 
which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt 
to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to 
mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is 
no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce 
is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the 
aspiration of man, these are sacred ; nor can I detach one 
duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my 
forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live 
onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of 
my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice 
to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the 
payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Owes he no 
debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed 
to a landlord's or a banker's ? 

There is no virtue which is final ; all are initial. The 
virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of re- 
form is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, 
or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit 
that has consumed our grosser vices. 

Forgive his crimes, fo'rgive his virtues too, 

Those smaller faults, half converts to the right. 

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish 
| our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofit- 
| ableness day by day; but when these waves of God flow 



164 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly com- 
pute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the 
month or the year ; for these moments confer a sort of omni- 
presence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, 
but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with 
the work to be done, without time. 

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader ex- 
claim, you have arrived at a fine pyrrhonism, at an equiva- 
lence and indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach 
us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively 
stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the 
true God. 

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened 
by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle 
throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in 
morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good 
into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea 
into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor 
hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should 
mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, 
let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. 
Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least dis- 
credit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing 
as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me 
sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless 
seeker with no Past at my back. 

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all 
things partake could never become sensible to us but by 
contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. 
Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal 
generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to 
creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains 
all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and thought 
as large and excellent as itself; but in vain; for that which 
is made instructs how to make a better. 

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all 
things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import 
rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, 
and old age seems the only disease : all others run into this 
one. We call it by many names, — fever, intemperance, in- 



i 1 



CIRCLES 165 

sanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: 
they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not new- 
ness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no 
need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we 
do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, re- 
ceptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts 
itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing 
from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume 
to know all; throw up their hope; renounce aspiration; ac- 
cept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young.. 
Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost ; let. them 
be lovers ; let them behold truth ; and their eyes are uplifted, 
their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope 
and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human 
mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always 
swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Noth- 
ing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No 
love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against 
a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial 
to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be 
settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope 
for them. 

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the 
mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are 
building up our being. Of lower states, — of acts of routine 
and sense, we can tell somewhat, but the masterpieces of 
God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, 
he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is 
divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no 
guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know. The new 
position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, 
yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies 
of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I 
cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowl- 
edge, as vacant and vain. Now for the first time seem I to 
know any thing rightly. The simplest words, — we do not 
know what they mean except when we love and aspire. 

The difference between talents and character is adroit- 
ness to keep the old and trodden round, and power and 
courage to make a new road to new and better goals. Char- 

K HCV 



166 CIRCLES 

acter makes an overpowering present, a cheerful, determined 
hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see 
that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. 
Character dulls the impression of particular events. When 
we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle 
or success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty. 
It was easy to him. The great man is not convulsible or 
tormentable. He is so much that events pass over him with- 
out much impression. People say sometimes, " See what I 
have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely 
I have triumphed over these black events." Not if they 
still remind me of the black event, — they have not yet con- 
quered. Is it conquest to be a gay and decorated sepulchre, 
or a half-crazed widow, hysterically laughing? True con- 
quest is the causing the black event to fade and disappear 
as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large 
and advancing. 

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to 
forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose 
our sempiternal memory and to do something without know- 
ing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing 
great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of 
life is wonderful. It is by abandonment. The great mo- 
ments of history are the facilities of performance through 
the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. 
" A man," said Oliver Cromwell, " never rises so high as 
when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and 
drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance 
and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dan- 
gerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the 
aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some t 
manner these flames and generosities of the heart. 



THE POET 

(1844) 

A moody child and wildly wise 

Pursued the game with joyful eyes, 

Which chose, like meteors, their way, 

And rived the dark with private ray : 

They overleapt the horizon's edge, 

Searched with Apollo's privilege ; 

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, 

Saw the dance of nature forward far ; 

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, 

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. 



Olympian bards who sung 
Divine ideas below, 
Which always find us young, 
And always keep us so. 

THOSE who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often 
persons who have acquired some knowledge of ad- 
mired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination 
for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are 
beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair 
pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their 
cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in 
one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their 
knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and par- 
ticulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is 
exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the 
shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds 
of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception 
of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no 
doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our 
bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about ; but there 
is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, 
much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in 

167 



168 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in 
any essential dependence of the material world on thought 
and volition. Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk 
of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a 
contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground 
of historical evidence ; and- even the poets are contented with 
a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems 
from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. 
But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to ex- 
plore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or 
the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every 
sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plu- 
tarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, 
picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor 
even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the 
fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and 
at two or three removes, when we know least about it. And 
this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of 
Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and |fj 
beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and 
functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means 
and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art 
in the present time. 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is repre- 
sentative. He stands among partial men for the complete 
man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common- 
wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to 
speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive 
of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature en- 
hances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief 
that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He 
is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his 
art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will 
draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, 
and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, 
in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful 
secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his 
expression. 

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate 
expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an 



THE POET 169 

interpreter: but the great majority of men seem to be minors, 
who have not yet come into possession of their own, or 
mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had 
with nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a 
supersensual utility in the sun, and stars, earth, and water. 
These stand and wait to render him a peculiar service. But 
there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our 
constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due 
effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to 
make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man 
should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversa- 
tion what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the 
rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, 
but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the reproduc- 
tion of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom 
these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, 
who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses 
the whole scale of experience, and its representative of man, 
in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart. 

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, 
which reappear, under different names, in every system of 
thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; 
or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, 
the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call 
here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand 
respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and 
for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each is that 
which he is essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted or 
analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others 
latent in him, and his own patent. 

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. 
He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world 
is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beauti- 
ful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but 
Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet 
is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own 
right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, 
which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first 
merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, 
overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are nat- 



170 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, 
and confounds them with those whose province is action, 
but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words 
are as costly and admirable to Homer, as Agamemnon's 
victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not wait for 
the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, 
so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reck- 
oning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to 
him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the 
studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building ma- 
terials to an architect. 

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever 
we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that 
region where the air is music, we hear those primal war- 
blings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and 
anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our 
own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate 
ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these 
transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the na- 
tions. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as 
it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be 
done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent 
modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and 
actions are a kind of words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he an- 
nounces that which no man foretold. He is the true and 
only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he is the only teller of 
news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which 
he describes. Fie is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of 
the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men 
of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of 
the true poet. I took part in a conversation the other day, 
concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, 
whose head appeared to be a music-box of delicate tunes and 
rhythms, and whose skill, and command of language, we could 
not sufficiently praise. But when the question arose, whether 
he was not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to 
confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal 
man. He does not stand out of our low limitations, like a 
Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base 



THE POET 171 

through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herb- 
age of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but this 
genius is the landscape-garden of a modern house, adorned 
with fountains and statues, with well-bred men and women 
standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, 
through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conven- 
tional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not 
the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish 
of the verses is primary. 

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that 
makes a poem, — a thought so passionate and alive, that, like 
the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of 
its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought 
and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order 
of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has 
a new thought : he has a whole new experience to unfold ; 
he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the 
richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age 
requires a new confession, and the world seems always wait- 
ing for its poet, I remember, when I was young, how much 
I was moved one morning by tidings that genius had ap- 
peared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his 
work, and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written 
hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether that which was 
in him was therein told: he could tell nothing but that all 
was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth, and sea. How 
gladly we listened ! how credulous ! Society seemed to be 
compromised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was 
to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be at twice the 
distance it had the night before, or was much farther than 
that. Rome, — what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare 
were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more should be heard 
of. It is much to know that poetry has been written this 
very day, under this very roof by your side. What ! that 
wonderful spirit has not expired ! these stony moments are 
still sparkling and animated ! I had fancied that the oracles 
were all silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold ! 
all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have been 
streaming. Every one has some interest in the advent of 
the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. 



172 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who 
or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain 
ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key 
into our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is in 
the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; 
genius realizes and adds. Mankind, in good earnest, have 
availed so far in understanding themselves and their work, 
that the foremost watchman on the peak announces his news. 
It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be 
the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world 
for that time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a 
poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so 
often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother 
who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made it his 
own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide 
in as an inspiration. And now my chains are to be broken; 
I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which 
I live, — opaque, though they seem transparent, — and from 
the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. 
That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see 
trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. 
Life will no more be a noise ; now I shall see men and 
women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned 
from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my 
birthday : then I became an animal : now I am invited into 
the science of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition 
is postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, who 
will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into the clouds, 
then leaps and frisks about with me from cloud to cloud, still 
affirming that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself 
a novice, and slow in perceiving that he does not know the 
way into the heavens, and is merely bent that I should ad- 
mire his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way 
from the ground or the water; but the all-piercing, all-feed- 
ing, and ocular air of heaven, that man shall never inhabit. 
I tumble down again soon into my old nooks, and lead the 
life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith in 
the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where 
I would be. 



; 



THE POET 173 

But leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, 
observe how nature, by worthier impulses, has ensured the 
poet's fidelity to his office of announcement and affirming, 
namely, by the beauty of things, which becomes a new, and 
higher beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her crea- 
tures to him as a picture-language. Being used as a type, 
a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better 
than its old value, as the carpenter's stretched cord, if you 
hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. 

" Things more excellent than every image," says Jambli- 
chus, " are expressed through images." Things admit of 
being used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the 
whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the 
sand, has expression; and there is no body without its spirit 
of genius. All form is an effect of character; all condition, 
of the quality of life; all harmony, of health; (and for this 
reason, a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, or 
proper only to the good). The beautiful rests on the founda- 
tions of the necessary. The soul makes the body, as the 
wise Spenser teaches : — 

So every spirit, as it is most pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight, 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
For of the soul, the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make. 

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical specula- 
tion, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and 
reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there 
where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety. 
The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wher- 
ever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our 
science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and 
the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually 
treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue 
of that Being we have. " The mighty heaven," said Proclus, 
" exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the splendor 
of intellectual perceptions; being moved in conjunction with 
the unapparent periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, 



174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the 
man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the 
state of science is an index of our self-knowledge. Since 
every thing in nature answers to a moral power, if any 
phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corre- 
sponding faculty in the observer is not yet active. 

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover 
over them with a religious regard. The beauty of the fable 
proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and to all 
others; or if you please, every man is so far a poet as to be 
susceptible of these enchantments of nature : for all men have 
the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I 
find that the fascination resides in the symbol. Who loves 
nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, and men of leisure 
and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, 
farmers, grooms, and butchers, though they express their 
affection in their choice of life, and not in their choice 
of words. The writer wonders what the coachman or the 
hunter values in riding, in horses, and dogs. It is not super- 
ficial qualities. When you talk with him, he holds these at as 
slight a rate as you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no 
definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the living 
power which he feels to be there present. No imitation, 
or playing of these things, would content him; he loves 
the earnest of the northwind, of rain, of stone, and wood, 
and iron. A beauty not explicable, is dearer than a beauty 
which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, 
nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life, 
which he worships, with coarse, but sincere rites. 

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment, drives 
men of every class to the use of emblems. The schools of 
poets, and philosophers, are not more intoxicated with their 
symbols, than the populace with theirs. In our political 
parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the 
great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill ! In 
the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in 
a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the cider-barrel, the I 
log cabin, the hickory-stick, the palmetto, and all the cog- 
nizances of party. See the power of national emblems. 
Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or 



THE POET 175 

j other figure, which came into credit God knows how, on an 
old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the 
ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the 
rudest, or the most conventional exterior. The people fancy 
they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics ! 

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are 
; apprised of the divineness of this superior use of things, 
I whereby the world is a temple, whose walls are covered with 
I emblems, pictures, and commandments of the Deity, in this, 
that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole 
sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in 
events, and in affairs, of low and high, honest and base, dis- 
appear when nature is used as a symbol. Thought makes 
every thing fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient 
man would embrace words and images excluded from polite 
conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the ob- 
scene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of 
thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their gross- 
ness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry 
to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve 
as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which 
a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more 
lasting in the memories of men: just as we choose the small- 
est box, or case, in which any needful utensil can be carried. 
Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative 
and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that 
he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary, when 
he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest 
experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing 
thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and 
night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve 
us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are 
far from having exhausted the significance of the few sym- 
bols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible 
simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. 
Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new 
word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred pur- 
pose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are 
such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mytholo- 
gists observe, defects are ascribed to divine natures, as lame- 



176 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signify 
exuberances. 

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of 
God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things 
to nature and the Whole, — re-attaching even artificial things 
and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight — dis- 
poses very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers 
of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy 
that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these ; for 
these works of art are not yet consecrated in their readings; 
but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less 
than the bee-hive, or the spider's geometrical web. Nature 
adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding 
train of cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred 
mind, it signifies nothing how many mechanical inventions 
you exhibit. Though you add millions, and never so surpris- 
ing, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. 
The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few 
particulars ; as no mountain is of any appreciable height 
to break the curve of the sphere. A shrewd country-boy 
goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent citizen 
is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does 
not see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw such ! 
before, but he disposes of them as easily as the poet finds ! 
place for the railway. The chief value of the new fact, is to 
enhance the great and constant fact of Life, which can dwarf j 
any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of wam-j 
pum, and the commerce of America, are alike. 

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and > 
noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life'il 
is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, — and though all mentl 
are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named, — I 
yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols, andr I 
inhabit symbols; workman, work, and tools, words and' 
things, birth and death, all are emblems; but we sympathize, j 
with the symbols, and, being infatuated with the economical 
uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. 
The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives themi • i 
a power which makes their old use forgotten, and put eyes, 
and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He per 






THE POET 177 

ceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the 
stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the 
symbol. As the eyes of Lyncseus were said to see through 
the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows 
us all things in their right series and procession. For, 
through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to 
things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis ; perceives that 
thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature 
is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form ; and, 
following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which expres's 
that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. 
All the facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, 
birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of the world into 
the soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear a new 
and higher fact. He uses forms according to the life, and 
not according to the form. This is true science. The poet 
alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, 
for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. 
He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown 
with these flowers we call suns, and .moons, and stars; why 
the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; 
for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses 
of thought. 

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Lan- 
guage-maker, naming things sometimes after their appear- 
ance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one 
its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the in- 
tellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The 
poets made all the words, and therefore language is the 
archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of 
the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is 
forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and 
obtained currency, because, for the moment it symbolized the 
world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymol- 
ogist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant 
picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the 
continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animal- 
cules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which 
now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us 
of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because 



178 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. 
This expression or naming, is not art, but a second nature, 
grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call 
nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and 
nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave 
another to baptize her, but baptizes herself ; and this through 
the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet 
described it to me thus : 

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, 
whether wholly or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature 
through all her kingdoms, insures herself. Nobody cares 
for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the 
gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being 
preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or 
next day. The new agaric of this hour has a chance which 
the old one had not. This atom of seed is thrown into a 
new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed its 
parent two rods off. She makes a man ; and having brought 
him to ripe age, she will no longer run the risk of losing 
this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, 
that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the in- 
dividual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come 
to ripeness of thought she detaches and sends away from it 
its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, 
which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom 
of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such 
was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which 
carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the 
hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's 
soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal 
parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which 
swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; 
but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short 
leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from 
the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But 
the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into 
the deeps of infinite time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But 
nature has a higher end, in the production of new individuals, 



THE POET 179 

than security, namely, ascension, or the passage of the soul 
into higher forms. I knew, in my younger days, the sculptor 
who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public 
garden. He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly, 
what made him happy, or unhappy, but by wonderful indi- 
rections he could tell. He rose one day, according to his 
habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand 
as the eternity out of which it came, and, for many days 
after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and lo ! his 
chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful 
youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is said, all 
persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns 
himself to his mood, and that thought which agitated him 
is expressed, but alter idem in a manner totally new. The 
expression is organic, or, the new type which things them- 
selves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint 
their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the 
aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more 
i delicate copy of their essence in his mind. Like the meta- 
I morphosis of things into higher organic forms, is their change 
1 into melodies. Over every thing stands its daemon, or soul, 
and, as the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so the 
soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the 
mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, 
or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in 
the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently 
fine, he overhears them, and endeavors to write down the 
notes, without diluting or depraving them. And herein is 
the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the 
poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with 
which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of 
our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated 
nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group 
of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious 
as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without false- 
hood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and 
stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably 
executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth 
that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate 
the invention of nature? 



180 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Im- 
agination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come 
by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, 
by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and 
making them translucid to others. The path of things is 
silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A 
spy they will not suffer ; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency 
of their own nature, — him they will suffer. The condition 
of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself 
to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and ac- 
companying that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, 
that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious in- 
tellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect 
doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; 
that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, 
there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by un- 
locking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethe- 
real tides to roll and circulate through him : then he is caught 
up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his 
thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as 
the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks ad- 
equately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, 
"with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used 
as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, 
and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, 
as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with 
intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. 
As the traveller who has lost his way, throws his reins on j 
his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal [ 
to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who 
carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can 
stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into 
nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and 
highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. 

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, 
coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or 
whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail 
themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraor- 
dinary power to their normal powers ; and to this end they ; 



THE POST 181 

prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, the- 
atres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, 
or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser 
or finer ^Ma-si-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, 
which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to 
the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency 
of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help 
him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent 
up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he 
is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were profes- 
sionally expressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, 
and actors, have been more than others wont to lead a life 
of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received 
the true nectar ; and, as it was a spurious mode of obtaining 
freedom, an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the 
freedom' of baser places, they were punished for that ad- 
vantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But 
never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The 
spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, 
comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The 
sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean 
and chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we owe 
to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement and fury. Milton 
says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, 
but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their 
descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. 

For poetry is not " Devil's wine," but God's wine. It is 
with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and nurseries 
of our children with all manner of dolls, drums, and horses, 
withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and sufficing 
object of nature, the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, 
and stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's habit 
of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the 
common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness 
should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his 
inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water. That spirit 
which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such 
from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine-stump, 
and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun 
shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as are 

L HCV 






182 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with Boston and New 
York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy 
jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find 
no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive 
in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder 
an emotion of joy. 

The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation 
and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a 
wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like 
children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or 
cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, 
fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus lib- 
erating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found 
within their world, another world or nest of worlds ; for the 
metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. 
I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of 
algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, 
but it is felt in every definition ; as, when Aristotle defines 
space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are con- 
tained; — or, when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; 
or, figure to be a bound of solid; and many the like. What 
a joyful sense of freedom we have, when Vitruvius an- 
nounces the old opinion of artists, that no architect can 
build any house well, who does not know something of 
anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the 
soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, and that 
these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temper- 
ance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an 
animal; and Timseus affirms that the plants also are animals; 
or affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his 
root, which is his head, upward; and, as George Chapman, 
following him, writes, — 

So in our tree of man, whose nervie root 
Springs in his top ; 

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as " that white flower 
which marks extreme old age;" when Proclus calls the uni- 
verse the statue of the intellect ; when Chaucer, in his praise 
of " Gentilesse," compares good blood in mean condition to 






THE POET 183 

fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this 
and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office, 
and burn as bright as if twenty thousand men did it behold; 
when John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the world 
through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the figtree 
casteth her untimely fruit; when iEsop reports the whole 
catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade 
of birds and beasts; — we take the cheerful hint of the im- 
mortality of our essence, and its versatile habit and escapes, 
as when the gypsies say, " it is vain to hang them, they 
cannot die." 

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British 
bards had for the title of their order, " Those who are free 
throughout the world." They are free, and they make free. 
An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, 
by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when 
we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing 
is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and 
extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by 
his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and 
the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him 
like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all 
the arguments and histories and criticism. All the value which 
attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Car- 
dan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who 
introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, 
devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is 
the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that 
here is a new witness. That also is the best success in con- 
versation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world like a 
ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems ; 
how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the 
intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great 
the perspective ! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear 
like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; 
I dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, 
i we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our 

I opulence. 

i 

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. 
The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the 



184 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cot- 
tage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink 
of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The 
inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is won- 
derful. What if you come near to it, — you are as remote, 
when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every 
thought is also a prison ; every heaven is also a prison. 
Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, , 
whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, | [ 
has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and f 
admits us to a new scene. ' 

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to im- h 
part it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of J 
thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of 
the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth, that I* 
the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his ex- f 
ponent. Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will 
take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world 
are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men. 

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to 
freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but 
read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning; 
but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. 
Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that 
the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense 
for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all f 
symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transi 
tive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, [' 
not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism con- f< 
sists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol I 1 ! 
for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be 
the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behman, and comes f 
to stand to him for truth and faith; and he believes should 
stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first 
reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, i 
or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem.; 
Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the 
person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held 
lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent 
terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily 



THE POET 185 

told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious 
use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, 
instead of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of 
these village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers. The 
history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error 
consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at 
last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language. 

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands emi- 
nently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not 
know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly 
for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. 
Every thing on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of 
moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. 
When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig 
which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, 
at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on 
coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. 
The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, ap- 
peared like dragons, and seemed in darkness : but, to each 
other, they appeared as men, and, when the light from 
heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the dark- 
ness, and were compelled to shut the window that they might 
see. 

There was this perception in him, which makes the poet 
or seer, an object of awe and terror, namely, that the same 
man, or society of men, may wear one aspect to themselves 
and their companions, and a different aspect to higher in- 
telligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing 
very learnedly together, appeared to the children, who were 
at some distance, like dead horses : and many the like mis- 
appearances. And instantly the mind inquires, whether these 
fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those 
dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or 
only so appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear 
upright men; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. 
The Brahmins and Pythagoras propounded the same ques- 
tion, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation, he 
doubtless found it in harmony with various experiences. We 
I have all seen changes as considerable in wheat and cater- 
pillars. He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and 



186 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm nature, 
and can declare it. 

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with 
sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address our- 
selves to life, nor dare we chant our own times and social cir- 
cumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not 
shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many 
gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the rec- 
onciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that he 
dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into 
universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with 
tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable 
materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the 
times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he 
so much admires in Homer ; then in the middle age ; then in 
Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, 
methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, 
but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of 
Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing 
away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our 
fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boats, and our re- 
pudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of 
honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the 
western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet 
America is a poem in our eyes ; its ample geography dazzles 
the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I 
have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my 
countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix 
the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's 
collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, 
more than poets, though there have been poets among them. 
But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our 
difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too liter- 
ary, and Homer too literal and historical. 

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and 
must see the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my 
errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art. 

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths, or 
methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see 
them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, un- 



THE POET 187 

less he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, 
the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one 
desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abun- 
dantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. They found or put 
themselves in certain conditions, as, the painter and sculptor 
before some impressive human figures; the orator, into the 
assembly of the people ; and the others, in such scenes as 
each has found exciting to his intellect; and each presently 
feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. 
Then he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of daemons 
hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old 
painter, " By God, it is in me, and must go forth of me." 
He pursues a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The 
poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things 
he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says 
something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. 
He would say nothing else but such things. In our way of 
talking, we say, " That is yours, this is mine ;" but the poet 
knows well that it is not his ; that it is as strange and beau- 
tiful to him as to you ; he would fain hear the like eloquence 
at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he can- 
not have enough of it, and, as an admirable creative power 
exists in these intellections, it is of the last importance that 
these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is 
said ! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up ! 
and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so 
many secrets sleep in nature ! Hence the necessity of speech 
and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings in the ora- 
tor, at the door of the assembly, to the 3nd, namely, that 
thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word. 

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, " It is in me, and 
shall out." Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and 
stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at 
last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every 
night shows thee is thine own ; a power transcending all limit 
and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor 
of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, 
or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk 
before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that 
power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, 



188 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's 
ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like 
the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of 
our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmos- 
phere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, 
Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits 
to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and re- 
semble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render 
an image of every created thing. 

O poet ! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, 
and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, any longer. The 
conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, 
and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer 
the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but 
shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled 
from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal 
hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, 
and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdi- 
cate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content 
that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, 
and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; 
others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou 
shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to 
the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renuncia- 
tions and apprenticeships, and this is thine : thou must pass 
for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and 
sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, 
and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall 
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able 
to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old 
shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward : that 
the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the 
actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not 
troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have 
the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath 
and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods 
and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that 
wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true 
land-lord ! sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wherever snow falls, or water 
flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, 



THE POET 189 

wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with 
stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, 
wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, 
and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed 
for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou 
shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble. 



; ; 






CHARACTER 

(1844) 

The sun set ; but set not his hope : 

Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up : 

Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 

Deeper and older seemed his eye : 

And matched his sufferance sublime 

The taciturnity of time. 

He spoke, and words more soft than rain 

Brought the Age of Gold again : 

His action won such reverence sweet, 

As hid all measure of the feat. 



Work of his hand 
He nor commends nor grieves : 
Pleads for itself the fact ; 
As unrepenting Nature leaves 
Her every act. 

I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord Chatham 
felt that there was something finer in the man, than 
anything which he said. It has been complained of our 
brilliant English historian of the French Revolution, that 
when he has told all his facts about Mirabeau, they do not 
justify his estimate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleom- 
enes, and others of Plutarch's heroes, do not in the record 
of facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl 
of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men of great figure, and 
of few deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the per- 
sonal weight of Washington, in the narrative of his exploits. 
The authority of the name of Schiller is too great for his 
books. This inequality of the reputation to the works or 
the anecdote is not accounted for by saying that the 
reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap; but somewhat 
resided in these men which begot an expectation that outran 
all their performance. The largest part of their power was 

191 



192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

latent. This is that which we call Character, — a reserved 
force which acts directly by presence, and without means. 
It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a 
Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, 
but whose counsels he cannot impart; which is company for 
him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they chance 
to be social, do not need society, but can entertain themselves 
very well alone. The purest literary talent appears at one 
time great, at another time small, but character is of a 
stellar and undiminishable greatness. What others effect 
by talent or by eloquence this man accomplishes by some 
magnetism. " Half his strength he put not forth." His 
victories are by demonstration of superiority, and not by 
crossing of bayonets. He conquers, because his arrival alters 
the face of affairs. " ' O Iole ! how did you know that Her- 
cules was a god ? ' ' Because,' answered Iole, ' I was content 
the moment my eyes fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, 
I desired that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide 
his horses in the chariot-race; but Hercules did not wait 
for a contest; he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or 
sat, or whatever thing he did.' " Man, ordinarily a pendant 
to events, only half attached, and that awkwardly, to the 
world he lives in, in these examples appears to share the 
life of things, and to be an expression of the same laws 
which control the tides and the sun, numbers and quantities. 
But to use a more modest illustration, and nearer home, I 
observe, that in our political elections, where this element, 
if it appears at all, can only occur in its coarsest form, we 
sufficiently understand its incomparable rate. The people 
know that they need in their representative much more than 
talent, namely, the power to make his talent trusted. They 
cannot come at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, 
acute, and fluent speaker, if he be not one, who, before he 
was appointed by the people to represent them, was ap- 
pointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact,— invincibly 
persuaded of that fact in himself, — so that the most con- 
fident and the most violent persons learn that here is resist- 
ance on which both impudence and terror are wasted, 
namely, fath in a fact. The men who carry their points do 
not need to inquire of their constituents what they should 






CHARACTER 193 

say, but are themselves the country which they represent: 
nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and true as 
in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The con- 
stituency at home hearkens to their words, watches the color 
of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. 
Our public assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. 
Our frank countrymen of the west and south have a taste 
for character, and like to know whether the New Englander 
is a substantial man, or whether the hand can pass through 
him. 

The same motive force appears in trade. There are geniuses 
in trade, as well as in war, or the state, or letters ; and the 
reason why this or that man is fortunate, is not to be told. 
It lies in the man: that is all anybody can tell you about it. 
See him, and you will know as easily why he succeeds, as, 
if you see Napoleon, you would comprehend his fortune. 
In the new objects we recognize the old game, the habit of 
fronting the fact, and not dealing with it at second-hand, 
through the perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems to 
authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant, who 
appears not so much a private agent, as her factor and Minis- 
ter of Commerce. His natural probity combines with his in- 
sight into the fabric of society, to put him above tricks, and he 
communicates to all his own faith, that contracts are of no 
private interpretation. The habit of his mind is a reference 
to standards of natural equity and public advantage ; and he 
inspires respect, and the wish to deal with him, both for the 
quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for the intel- 
lectual pastime which the spectacle of so much ability affords. 
This immensely stretched trade, which makes the capes of 
the Southern Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his 
familiar port, centres in his brain only; and noboc 1 y in the 
universe can make his place good. In his parlor, I see very 
well that he has been at hard work this morning, with that 
knitted brow, and that settled humor, which all his desire to 
be courteous cannot shake off. ' I see plainly how many firm 
acts have been done; how many valiant noes have this day 
been spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. 
I see, with the pride of art, and skill of masterly arithmetic 
and power of remote combination, the consciousness of being 



194 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world. 
He too believes that none can supply him, and that a man 
must be born to trade, or he cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more, when it appears in ac- 
tion to ends not so mixed. It works with most energy in the 
smallest companies and in private relations. In all cases, 
it is an extraordinary and incomputable agent. The excess 
of physical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher natures over- 
power lower ones by affecting them with a certain sleep. 
The faculties are locked up, and offer no resistance. Per- 
haps that is the universal law. When the high cannot bring 
up the low to itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down the 
resistance of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a 
similar occult power. How often has the influence of a true 
master realized all the tales of magic ! A river of command 
seemed to run down from his eyes into all those who beheld 
him, a torrent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, 
which pervaded them with his thoughts, and colored all 
events with the hue of his mind. " What means did you em- 
ploy ? " was the question asked of the wife of Concini, in 
regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici ; and the answer 
was, " Only that influence which every strong mind has over 
a weak one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the irons, 
and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thraso the 
turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immutable a bond? Sup- 
pose a slaver on the coast of Guinea should take on board a 
gang of negroes, which should contain persons of the stamp 
of Toussaint L'Ouverture : or, let us fancy, under these 
swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in chains. 
When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative order of the 
ship's company be the same ? Is there nothing but rope and 
iron? Is there no love, no reverence? Is there never a 
glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind ; and cannot 
these be supposed available to break, or elude, or in any 
manner overmatch the tension of an inch or two of iron 
rino - ? 

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature 
cooperates with it. The reason why we feel one man's pres- 
ence, and do not feel another's, is as simple as gravity. Truth 
is the summit of being: justice is the application of it to 



CHARACTER 195 

affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, according to 
the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure 
runs down from them into other natures, as water runs down 
from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force is no 
more to be withstood, than any other natural force. We 
can drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but it 
is yet true that all stones will forever fall ; and whatever 
instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which 
somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is the privilege 
of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moral 
order seen through the medium of an individual nature. An 
individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and neces- 
sity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. Now, 
the universe is a close or pound. All things exist in the man 
tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality is 
in him, he infuses all nature that he can reach ; nor does he 
tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve 
soever, all his regards return into his own good at last. He 
animates all he can, and he sees only what he animates. 
He encloses the world, as the patriot does his country, as a 
material basis for his character, and a theatre for action. A 
healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as 
the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands 
to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and 
the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys 
towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest 
influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus men 
of character are the conscience of the society to which they 
belong. 

The natural measure of this power is the resistance of 
circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is reflected 
in opinions, events, and persons. They cannot see the action, 
until it is done. Yet its moral element pre-existed in the 
actor, and its quality as right or wrong, it was easy to pre- 
dict. Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive and 
negative pole. There is a male and a female, a spirit and a 
fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is 
the negative. Will is the north, action the south pole. Char- 
acter may be ranked as having its natural place in the north. 
It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble 



196 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

souls are drawn to the south or negative pole. They look at 
the profit or hurt of the action. They never behold a princi- 
ple until it is lodged in a person. They do not wish to be 
lovely, but to be loved. The class of character like to hear 
of their faults: the other class do not like to hear of faults; 
they worship events; secure to them a fact, a connection, a 
certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask no more. 
The hero sees that the event is ancillary : it must follow him. 
A given order of events has no power to secure to him the 
satisfaction which the imagination attaches to it; the soul 
of goodness escapes from any set of circumstances, whilst 
prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that 
power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order 
of events. No change of circumstances can repair a defect 
of character. We boast our emancipation from many super- 
stitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a 
transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained, that I no 
longer immolate a bull to Jove, or to Neptune, or a mouse 
to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or 
the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — 
if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it; or 
at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or 
poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or of 
murder ? If I quake, what matters it what I quake at ? Our 
proper vice takes form in one or another shape, according 
to the sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we 
are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The covetous- 
ness or the malignity which saddens me, when I ascribe it to 
society, is my own. I am always environed by myself. On 
the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated 
not by cries of joy, but by serenity, which is joy fixed or 
habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation 
of our truth and worth. The capitalist does not run every 
hour to the broker, to coin his advantages into current money 
of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of the 
market, that his stocks have risen. The same transport 
which the occurrence of the best events in the best order 
would occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in the per- 
ception that my position is every hour meliorated, and does 
already command those events I desire. That exultation is 



CHARACTER 197 

| only to be checked by the foresight of an order of things so 
excellent, as to throw all our prosperities into the deepest 
shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self-sufhcingness. 
I revere the person who is riches; so that I cannot think of 
him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but 
as perpetual patron, benefactor, and beatified man. Char- 
acter is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or 
overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. Society is 
frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into 
ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an ingenious 
man, I shall think myself poorly entertained if he give me 
nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette; rather he shall 
stand stoutly in his place, and let me apprehend, if it were 
only his resistance ; know that I have encountered a new and 
positive quality; — great refreshment for both of us. It is 
much, that he does not accept the conventional opinions and 
practices. That nonconformity will remain a goad and re- 
membrancer, and every inquirer will have to dispose of him, 
in the first place. There is nothing real or useful that is not 
a seat of war. Our houses ring with laughter and personal 
and critical gossip, but it helps little. But the uncivil, un- 
available man, who is a problem and a threat to society, 
whom it cannot let pass in silence, but must either worship 
or hate, — and to whom all parties feel related, both the lead- 
ers of opinion, and the obscure and eccentric, — he helps ; 
he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and destroys the 
scepticism which says, " man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 
'tis the best we can do," by illuminating the untried and 
unknown. Acquiescence in the establishment, and appeal to 
the public, indicate infirm faith, heads which are not clear, 
and which must see a house built, before they can compre- 
hend the plan of it. The wise man not only leaves out of 
his thought the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, 
fountains, the self-moved, the absorbed, the commander be- 
cause he is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they are 
good; for these announce the instant presence of supreme 
power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our substance. 
In nature, there are no false valuations. A pound of water 

M HCV 



198 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in the ocean-tempest has no more gravity than in a mid- 
summer pond. All things work exactly according to their 
quality, and according to their quantity; attempt nothing 
they cannot do, except man only. He has pretension: 
he wishes and attempts things beyond his force. I read 
in a book of English memoirs, "Mr. Fox (afterwards 
Lord Holland) said, he must have the Treasury; he 
had served up to it, and would have it." Xenophon and 
his Ten Thousand were quite equal to what they attempted, 
and did it; so equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand 
and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that fact unrepeated, 
a high-water-mark in military history. Many have attempted 
it since, and not been equal to it. It is only on reality, that 
any power of action can be based. No institution will be 
better than the institutor. I knew an amiable and accom- 
plished person who undertook a practical reform, yet I was 
never able to find in him the enterprise of love he took in 
hand. He adopted it by ear and by the understanding from 
the books he had been reading. All his action was tentative, 
a piece of the city carried out into the fields, and was the 
city still, and no new fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. 
Had there been something latent in the man, a terrible un- 
demonstrated genius agitating and embarrassing his de- 
meanor, we had watched for its advent. It is not enough 
that the intellect should see the evils, and their remedy. We 
shall still postpone our existence, nor take the ground to 
which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought and not a 
spirit that incites us. We have not yet served up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is the notice 
of incessant growth. Men should be intelligent and earnest. 
They must also make us feel, that they have a controlling 
happy future, opening before them, which sheds a splendor 
on the passing hour. The hero is misconceived and misre- 
ported : he cannot therefore wait to unravel any man's blun- 
ders : he is again on his road, adding new powers and honors 
to his domain, and new claims on your heart, which will 
bankrupt you, if you have loitered about the old things, and 
have not kept your relation to him, by adding to your wealth. 
New actions are the only apologies and explanations of old 
ones, which the noble can bear to offer or to receive. If; 



CHARACTER 199 

your friend has displeased you, you shall not sit down to 
consider it, for he has already lost all memory of the passage, 
and has doubled his power to serve you, and, ere you can 
rise up again, will burden you with blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence that is 
only measured by its Works. Love is inexhaustible, and if 
its estate is wasted, its granary emptied, still cheers and en- 
riches, and the man, though he sleep, seems to purify the 
air, and his house to adorn the landscape and strengthen the 
laws. People always recognize this difference. We know 
who is benevolent, by quite other means than the amount of 
subscription to soup-societies. It is only low merits that can 
be enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what 
you have done well, and say it through ; but when they stand 
with uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and 
must suspend their judgment for years to come, you may be- 
gin to hope. Those who live to the future must always 
appear selfish to those who live to the present. Therefore 
it was droll in the good Riemer, who has written memoirs 
of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations and good 
deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, 
to Tischbein : a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, a 
post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, 
two professors recommended to foreign universities, &c, &c. 
The longest list of specifications of benefit, would look very 
short. A man is a poor creature, if he is to be measured so. 
For, all these, of course, are exceptions; and the rule and 
hodiernal life of a good man is benefaction. The true charity 
of Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave Dr. 
Eckermann, of the way in which he had spent his fortune. 
" Each bon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a 
million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary, 
and the large income derived from my writings for fifty years 
back, have been expended to instruct me in what I now 
know. I have besides seen," &c. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enumerate 
traits of this simple and rapid power, and we are painting 
the lightning with charcoal; but in these long nights and 
vacations, I like to console myself so. Nothing but itself 
can copy it. A word warm from the heart enriches me. I 



200 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

surrender at discretion. How death-cold is literary genius 
before this fire of life ! These are the touches that reanimate 
my heavy soul, and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. 
I find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most rich. 
Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be again re- 
buked by some new exhibition of character. Strange alter- 
nation of attraction and repulsion ! Character repudiates 
intellect, yet excites it; and character passes into thought, 
is published so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of 
moral worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no use 
to ape it, or to contend with it. Somewhat is possible of 
resistance, and of persistence, and of creation, to this power, 
which will foil all emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's have 
been laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly-destined shall I 
slip up into life in the shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens f 
to watch and blazon every new thought, every blushing emo- f 
tion of young genius. Two persons lately, — very young chil- 
dren of the most high God, — have given me occasion for 
thought. When I explored the source of their sanctity, and 
charm for the imagination, it seemed as if each answered, 
" From my non-conformity : I never listened to your people's 
law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time 
I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own; 
hence this sweetness : my work never reminds you of that ; — 
is pure of that." And nature advertises me in such persons, 
that, in democratic America, she will not be democratized. 
How cloistered and constitutionally sequestered from the 
market and from scandal ! It was only this morning, that I 
sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are 
a relief from literature, — these fresh draughts from the 
sources of thought and sentiment; as we read, in an age of 
polish and criticism, the first lines of written prose and verse 
of a nation. How captivating is their devotion to their 
favorite books, whether yEschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or ; 
Scott, as feeling that they have a stake in that book: who 
touches that, touches them; — and especially the total solitude 
of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which he writes, in 
unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read this writing. 



CHARACTER 201 

Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake to com- 
parisons, and to be flattered ! Yet some natures are too good 
to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought 
reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from 
vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the 
head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets,, but they 
can afford to smile. I remember the indignation of an elo- 
quent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a Doctor of 
Divinity, — " My friend, a man can neither be praised nor 
insulted." But forgive the counsels ; they are very natural. 
I remember the thought which occurred to me when some 
ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, 
Have you been victimized in being brought hither? — or, 
prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable? " 

As I have said, nature keeps these sovereignties in her own 
hands, and however pertly our sermons and disciplines would 
divide some share of credit, and teach that the laws fashion 
the citizen, she goes her own gait, and puts the wisest in the 
wrong. She makes very light of gospels and prophets, as 
one who has a great many more to produce, and no excess of 
time to spare on any one. There is a class of men, indi- 
viduals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently en- 
dowed with insight and virtue, that they have been unani- 
mously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumulation 
of that power we consider. Divine persons are character 
born, or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are victory 
organized. They are usually received with ill-will, because 
they are new, and because they set a bound to the exaggera- 
tion that has been made of the personality of the last divine 
person. Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two 
men alike. 

When we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance 
to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his 
character and fortune, a result which he is sure to dis- 
appoint. None will ever solve the problem of his char- 
acter according to our prejudice, but only in his own high 
unprecedented way. Character wants room; must not be 
crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in 
the press of affairs or on few occasions. It needs perspective, 
as a great building. It may not, probably does not, form re- 



202 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

lations rapidly; and we should not require rash explanation, 
either on the popular ethics, or on our own, of its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo 
and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait 
which the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and 
better than his copy. We have seen many counterfeits, but 
we are born believers in great men. How easily we read in 
old books, when men were few, of the smallest action of the 
patriarchs. We require that a man should be so large and 
columnar in the landscape, that it should deserve to be re- 
corded, that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed 
to such a place. The most credible pictures are those of 
majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and convinced 
the senses ; as happened to the eastern magian who was sent 
to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the 
Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp 
appointed a day on which the mobeds of every country should 
assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage. 
Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced 
into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing 
that chief, said, " This form and this gait cannot lie, and 
nothing but truth can proceed from them." Plato said, it 
was impossible not to believe in the children of the gods, 
" though they should speak without probable or necessary 
arguments." I should think myself very unhappy in my as- 
sociates, if I could not credit the best things in history. 
" John Bradshaw," says Milton, " appears like a consul, from 
whom the fasces are not to depart with the year; so that 
not on the tribunal only but throughout his life, you would 
regard him as sitting in judgment upon kings." I find it 
more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man 
should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many 
men should know the world. " The virtuous prince con- 
fronts the gods, without any misgiving. He waits a hundred 
ages till a sage comes, and does not doubt. He who con- 
fronts the gods, without any misgiving, knows heaven; he 
who waits a hundred ages until a sage comes, without doubt- 
ing, knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, and for 
ages shows empire the way." But there is no need to seek 
remote examples. He is a dull observer whose experience 



CHARACTER 203 

has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as well as 
of chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroad with- 
out encountering inexplicable influences. One man fastens 
an eye on him, and the graves of the memory render up their 
dead; the secrets that make him. wretched either to keep or 
to betray, must be yielded; — another, and he cannot speak, 
and the bones of his body seem to lose their cartilage ; the 
entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and eloquence to 
him; and there are persons, he cannot choose but remember, 
who gave a transcendant expansion to his thought, and kin- 
dled another life in his bosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when 
they spring from this deep root? The sufficient reply to the 
sceptic, who doubts the power and the furniture of man, 
is in that possibility of joyful intercourse with persons, which 
makes the faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know 
nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound 
good understanding, which can subsist, after much exchange 
of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is 
sure of himself, and sure of his friend. It is a happiness 
which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, 
and commerce, and churches, cheap. For, when men shall 
meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, 
clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it 
should be the festival of nature which all things announce. 
Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as 
all other things are symbols of love. Those relations to 
the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances 
of youth, become, in the progress of the character, the most 
solid enjoyment. 

If it were possible to live in right relations with men ! — 
if we could abstain from asking anything of them, from ask- 
ing their praise, or help, or pity, and content us with compel- 
ling them through the virtue of the eldest laws ! Could 
we not deal with a few persons, — with one person, — after 
the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment of their 
efficacy? Could we not pay our friend the compliment 
of truth, of silence, of forbearing? Need we be so eager 
to seek him? If we are related, we shall meet. It was 
a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could 



204 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which 
runs, 

The Gods are to each other not unknown. 

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravi- 
tate to each other, and cannot otherwise: — 

When each the other shall avoid 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed. 

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods must 
seat themselves without seneschal in our Olympus, and as 
they can install themselves by seniority divine. Society is 
spoiled if pains are taken, if the associates are brought a 
mile to meet. And if it be not society, it is a mischievous, 
low, degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All the 
greatness of each is kept back, and every foible in painful 
activity, as if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff- 
boxes. 

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we 
are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if sud- 
denly we encounter a friend we pause; our heat and hurry 
look foolish enough; now pause, now possession, is required, 
and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the 
heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations. 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; a friend is 
the hope of the heart. Our beatitude waits for the fulfil- 
ment of these two in one. The ages are opening this moral 
force. All force is the shadow or symbol of that. Poetry 
is joyful and strong, as it draws its inspiration thence. Men 
write their names on the world, as they are filled with this. 
History has been mean; our nations have been mobs; we 
have never seen a man: that divine form we do not yet 
know, but only the dream and prophecy of such : we do not 
know the majestic manners which belong to him, which ap- 
pease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that 
the most private is the most public energy, that quality atones 
for quantity, and grandeur of character acts in the dark, and 
succors them who never saw it. What greatness has yet 
appeared, is beginnings and encouragements to us in this 
direction. The history of those gods and saints which the 



CHARACTER 205 

world has written, and then worshipped, are documents of 
character. The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth 
who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the 
Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, 
shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death, which has 
transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for 
the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our 
highest fact. But the mind requires a victory to the senses, 
a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, 
and king; which will rule animal and mineral virtues, and 
blend with the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, 
and of moral agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs at 
least, let us do them homage. In society, high advantages 
are set down to the possessor, as disadvantages. It requires 
the more wariness in our private estimates. I do not for- 
give in my friends the failure to know a fine character, and 
to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last, 
that which we have always longed for, is arrived, and 
shines on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, 
then to be coarse, then to be critical, and treat such a visit- 
ant with the jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a 
vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is 
confusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no longer 
knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. 
Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the 
wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened 
into a flower, it blooms for me? if none sees it I see it; I am 
aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it 
blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my 
gloom, and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the 
presence of this guest. There are many eyes that can detect 
and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are 
many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the 
mob is incapable ; but when that love which is all-suffering, 
all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that 
it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than 
soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our 
streets and houses, — only the pure and aspiring can know 
its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it. 



MANNERS 

(1844) 

How near to good is what is fair ! 

Which we no sooner see, 
But with the lines and outward air 

Our senses taken be. 




Again yourselves compose, 
And now put all the aptness on 
Of Figure, that Proportion 

Or Color can disclose ; 
That if those silent arts were lost, 
Design and Picture, they might boast 

From you a newer ground, 
Instructed by the heightening sense 
Of dignity and reverence 

In their true motions found. 

— Ben Jonson. 

ALF the world, it is said, knows not how the other 
half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the 
Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human 
bones; and they are said to eat their own wives and children. 
The husbandry of the modern inhabitants of Gournou (west 
of old Thebes) is philosophical to a fault. To set up their 
housekeeping, nothing is requisite but two or three earthen 
pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. The 
house, namely, a tomb, is ready without rent or taxes. No 
rain can pass through the roof, and there is no door, for 
there is no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the 
house do not please them, they walk out and enter another, 
as there are several hundreds at their command. " It is 
somewhat singular," adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this 
account, " to talk of happiness among people who live in 
sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation 
which they know nothing of." In the deserts of Borgoo, 

207 



208 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like cliff-swallows, and 
the language of these negroes is compared by their neighbors 
to the shrieking of bats, and to the whistling of birds. Again, 
the Bornoos have no proper names ; individuals are called 
after their height, thickness, or other accidental quality, and 
have nicknames merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, 
and the gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, find 
their way into countries, where the purchaser and consumer 
can hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals and 
man-stealers ; countries where man serves himself with 
metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool; 
Honors himself with architecture; writes laws, and contrives 
to execute his will through the hands of many nations ; and, 
especially, establishes a select society, running through all 
the countries of intelligent men, a self-constituted aris- 
tocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, without written law 
or exact usage of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every 
new-planted island, and adopts and makes its own whatever 
personal beauty or extraordinary native endowment any- 
where appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern history, than the 
creation of the gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is 
that, and, in English literature, half the drama, and all the 
novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint 
this figure. The word gentleman, which, like the word 
Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the 
few preceding centuries, by the importance attached to it, 
is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. 
Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with 
the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be 
attributed to the valuable properties which it designates. An 
element which unites all the most forcible persons of every 
country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each 
other, and is somewhat so precise, that it is at once felt if 
an individual lack the masonic sign, cannot be any casual 
product, but must be an average result of the character and 
faculties universally found in men. It seems a certain per- 
manent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent compo- 
sition, while so many gases are combined only to be decom- 
pounded. Comme it fant, is the Frenchman's description 






MANNERS 209 

of good society, as zve must be. It is a spontaneous fruit 
of talents and feelings of precisely that class who have most 
vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, and, 
though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and 
highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole 
society permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than 
of the talent of men, and is a compound result, into which 
every great force enters as an ingredient, namely, virtue, 
wit, beauty, wealth, and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in use to 
express the excellence of manners and social cultivation, be- 
cause the quantities are fluctional, and the last effect is 
assumed by the senses as the cause. The word gentleman 
has not any correlative abstract to express the quality. Gen- 
tility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep 
alive in the vernacular, the distinction between fashion, a 
word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic 
character which the gentleman imports. The usual words, 
however, must be respected: they will be found to contain 
the root of the matter. The point of distinction in all this 
class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, 
is, that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are 
contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and 
not worth. The result is now in question, although our 
words intimate well enough the popular feeling, that the 
appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man 
of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that 
lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and 
servile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Be- 
yond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes 
good-nature or benevolence; manhood first, and then gen- 
tleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of 
ease and fortune; but that is a natural result of personal 
force and love, that they should possess and dispense the 
goods of the world. In times of violence, every eminent 
person must fall in with many opportunities to approve his 
stoutness and worth; therefore every man's name that 
emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in 
our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never \ 
goes out of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and, 



210 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

in the moving crowd of good society, the men of valor and 
reality are known, and rise to their natural place. The com- 
petition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but 
the personal force appears readily enough in these new 
arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, 
bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and 
clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the 
door; but whenever used in strictness, and with any em- 
phasis, the name will be found to point at original energy. 
It describes a man standing in his own right, and working 
after untaught methods. In a good lord, there must first 
be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the in- 
comparable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class 
must have more, but they must have these, giving in every 
company the sense of power, which makes things easy to 
be done which daunt the wise. The society of the energetic 
class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of cour- 
age, and attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The 
courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, 
or a sea fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some 
supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But mem- 
ory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the 
presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society 
must be up to the work of the world, and equal to their 
versatile office: men of the right Caesarian pattern, who 
have great range of affinity. I am far from believing the 
timid maxim of Lord Falkland, ("that for ceremony there 
must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through the 
cunningest forms,") and am of opinion that the gentleman 
is the bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through ; 
and only that plenteous nature is rightful master, which is 
the complement of whatever person it converses with. My 
gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints 
in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all 
courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates, and 
good with academicians ; so that it is useless to fortify your- 
self against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, 
and I could as easily exclude myself, as him. The famous 
gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of this strong type ; 






MANNERS 2J1 

Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, 
Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very care- 
lessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to 
value any condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular 
judgment, to the completion of this man of the world: and 
it is a material deputy which walks through the dance which 
the first has led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity 
is, which transcends the habits of clique and caste, and makes 
itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid 
in fashionable circles, and not with truckmen, he will never 
be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people cannot 
speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentle- 
man shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, 
he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas, 
are gentlemen of the best blood, who have chosen the condi- 
tion of poverty, when that of wealth was equally open to 
them. I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my 
contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation 
one of these well-appointed knights, but every collection of 
men furnishes some example of the class : and the politics of 
this country, and the trade of every town, are controlled by 
these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have invention to 
take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them in 
fellowship with crowds, and makes their action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and caught with 
devotion by men of taste. The association of these masters 
with each other, and with men intelligent of their merits, 
is mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good forms, the 
happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By 
swift consent, everything superfluous is dropped, everything 
graceful is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formi- 
dable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler science of 
defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the 
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, — 
points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a 
more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less trouble- 
some game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the 
players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impedi- 
ments, and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our 



212 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

dealing and conversation, as a railway aids travelling, by 
getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road, and 
leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms 
very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is 
cultivated with the more heed, that it becomes a badge of 
social and civil distinction. Thus grows up Fashion, an 
equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic 
and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which 
morals and violence assault in vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the class of power, 
and the exclusive and polished circles. The last are always 
filled or filling from the first. The strong men usually give 
some allowance even to the petulances of fashion, for that 
affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, 
destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the Fau- 
bourg St. Germain: doubtless with the feeling, that fashion 
is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a 
strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone 
to seed : it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often 
caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall 
of the Past. It usually sets its face against the great of this 
hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls: they are 
absent in the field : they are working, not triumphing. 
Fashion is made up of their children ; of those, who, through 
the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to 
their name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and 
generosity, and, in their physical organization, a certain 
health and excellence, which secures to them, if not the 
highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class 
of power, the working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the 
Napoleon, see that this is the festivity and permanent cele- 
bration of such as they; that fashion is funded talent; is 
Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin ; that the 
brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy names 
as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, 
their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons, in the ordi- 
nary course of things, must yield the possession of the 
harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger 
frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year 
1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was im- 



MANNERS 213 

becile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded 
long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is 
only country which came to town day before yesterday, that 
is city and court to-day. 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. 
These mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke 
anger in the least favored class, and the excluded majority 
revenge themselves on the excluding minority, by the strong 
hand, and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the 
top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk : and if the 
people should destroy class after class, until two men only 
were left, one of these would be the leader, and would be 
involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep 
this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious 
of life, and is one of the estates of the realm. I am the 
more struck with this tenacity, when I see its work. It re- 
spects the administration of such unimportant matters, that 
we should not look for any durability in its rule. We some- 
times meet men under some strong moral influence, as, a 
patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the 
moral sentiment rules man and nature. We think all other 
distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste 
or fashion, for example ; yet come from year to year, and see 
how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of 
man, where, too, it has not the least countenance from the 
law of the land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more 
impassable line. Here are associations whose ties go over, 
and under, and through it, a meeting of merchants, a military 
corps, a college-class, a fire-club, a professional association, a 
political, a religious convention; — the persons seem to draw 
inseparably near ; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its mem- 
bers will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his 
degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porce- 
lain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be 
frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of 
this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor acci- 
dental. Each man's rank in that perfect graduation depends 
on some symmetry in his structure, or some agreement in 
his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar 

instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A nat- 

n hcv 



214 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

ural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest 
patrician out, who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion un- 
derstands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of 
whatever country readily fraternize with those of every 
other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished them- 
selves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure. 

To say what good of fashion we can, — it rests on reality, 
and hates nothing so much as pretenders; — to exclude and 
mystify pretenders, and send them into everlasting " Cov- 
entry," is its delight. We contemn, in turn, every other gift 
of men of the world; but the habit even in little and the 
least matters, of not appealing to any but our own sense of 
propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There 
is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and pro- 
portioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt, and 
give it the freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always 
elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most 
guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some 
crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as 
his head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the 
iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and cotillons. 
For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of be- 
havior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden 
at her first ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes 
that there is a ritual according to which every act and compli- 
ment must be performed, or the failing party must be cast 
out of this presence. Later, they learn that good sense and \ 
character make their own forms every moment, and speak or 
abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or 
sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, 
or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way: and that 
strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashion- 
able. All that fashion demands is composure, and self- 
content. A circle of men perfectly well-bred would be a 
company of sensible persons, in which every man's native 
manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not 
this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-re- 
liance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show 
us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave 
to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any deference 



MANNERS 215 

to some eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all 
privilege of nobility. He is an underling : I have nothing to 
do with him; I will speak with his master. A man should 
not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society 
with him, — not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but 
atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the 
same attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his 
daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best 
beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. " If you 

could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on! " But Vich 

Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings in some fashion, 
if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons who are 
mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any 
time determine for the curious their standing in the world. 
These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept 
their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, 
and allow them all their privilege. They are clear in their 
office, nor could they be thus formidable, without their own 
merits. But do not measure the importance of this class 
by their pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dis- 
penser of honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate; 
for how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort 
of herald's office for the sifting of character? 

As the first thing man requires of man, is reality, so, that 
appears in all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by 
name, introduce the parties to each other. Know you before 
all heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory; 
— they look each other in the eye; they grasp each other's 
hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satis- 
faction. A gentleman never dodges : his eyes look straight 
forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he 
has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many 
visits and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, and 
decorations? Or, do we not insatiably ask, Was a man 
in the house? I may easily go into a great household where 
there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort, 
luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphit- 
ryon, who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into 
a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man 



216 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was there- 
fore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette, that a 
gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sover- 
eign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival 
at the door of his house. No house, though it were the 
Tuileries, or the Escurial, is good for anything without a 
master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality. 
Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, 
fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner 
of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his 
guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive 
nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre 
front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I know, 
quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of emi- 
nent convenience, whether the guest is too great, or too little. 
We call together many friends who keep each other in play, 
or, by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, 
and guard our retirement. Or if, perchance, a searching 
realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care 
to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide our- 
selves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. 
Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended him- 
self from the glances of Napoleon, by an immense pair of 
green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily 
managed to rally them off : and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was 
not great enough with eight hundred thousand troops at 
his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself 
with etiquette, and within triple barriers of reserve: and, as 
all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when 
he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all ex- 
pression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the 
most skilful masters of good manners. No rent-roll nor army- 
list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first 
point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms 
of good-breeding point that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's translation, Mon- 
taigne's account of his journey into Italy, and am struck 
with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions 
of the time. His arrival in each place, the arrival of a 
gentleman of France, is an event of some consequence. 



I 



/ 

MANNERS 217 

Wherever he goes, he pays a visit to whatever prince or 
gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to him- 
self and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which 
he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be 
painted and hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was 
the custom of gentlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of 
all the points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, 
is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne, and 
hold a king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness, to an excess 
of fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature 
and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. 
Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man 
enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred 
sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity 
and self-poise. We should meet each morning, as from for- 
eign countries, and spending the day together, should de- 
part at night, as into foreign countries. In all things I 
would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart 
as the gods, talking from peak to peak all around Olym- 
pus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This 
is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers 
should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, 
all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push 
this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and ab- 
sence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. [ A gentle- 
man makes no noise: a lady is serene.; Proportionate is our 
disgust at those invaders who fill a studious house with blast 
and running, to secure some paltry convenience. Not less 
I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbor's needs. 
Must we have a good understanding with one another's 
palates ? as foolish people who have lived long together, know 
when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he 
wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for 
sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out 
his plate, as if I knew already. Every natural function 
can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave 
hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our 
breeding should signify, however remotely, the recollection 
of the grandeur of our destiny. 



218 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, 
but if we dare to open another leaf, and explore what parts 
go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual 
quality. To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh 
and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners 
is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too 
coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and 
customs. It is not quite sufficient to good breeding, a union 
of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a 
perception of, and a homage to beauty in our companions. 
Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but 
a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit 
with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the 
truth or the laws, than with a sloven and unpresentable 
person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short dis- 
tances, the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of 
fit and fair runs out, if with less vigor, into all parts of life. 
The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting 
under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains 
every natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects everything 
which tends to unite men. It delights in measure. The love 
of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The 
person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or con- 
verses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If 
you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius, 
or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the want of meas- 
ure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the 
parts of the social instruments. Society will pardon much 
to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a conven- 
tion, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming 
together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely, 
what helps or hinders fellowship. For, fashion is not good 
sense absolute, but relative; not good sense private, but good 
sense entertaining company. It hates corners and sharp 
points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, 
and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total 
blending of parties ; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the 
highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fel- 
lowship. And besides the general infusion of wit to heighten 
civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever wel- 






MANNERS * 219 

come in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and 
its credit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it 
must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Ac- 
curacy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to polite- 
ness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too punc- 
tual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of busi- 
ness at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. 
Society loves Creole natures, and sleepy, languishing manners, 
so that they cover sense, grace, and goodwill; the air of 
drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because 
such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the 
game, and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, 
which does not see the annoyances, shifts and inconve- 
nience, that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the 
sensitive. 

Therefore, besides personal force and so much perception 
as constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician 
class another element already intimated, which it significantly 
terms good-nature, expressing all degrees of generosity, from 
the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights 
of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall 
run against one another, and miss the way to our food; but 
intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society, 
is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not 
happy in the company, cannot find any word in his memory 
that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little im- 
pertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn 
of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the intro- 
duction of that which he has to say. The favorites of 
society and what it calls whole souls, are able men, and of 
more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, 
but who exactly fill the hour and the company, contented and 
contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a 
water party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich 
in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present cen- 
tury, a good model of that genius which the world loves, in 
Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the most social 
disposition, and real love of men. Parliamentary history has 
few better passages than the debate, in which Burke and Fox 



220 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

separated in the House of Commons ; when Fox urged on his 
old friend the claims of old friendship with such tenderness, 
that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so 
close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A trades- 
man who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred 
guineas, found him one day counting gold, and demanded 
payment : " No," said Fox, " I owe this money to Sheridan : 
it is a debt of honor : if an accident should happen to me, he 
has nothing to show." " Then," said the creditor, " I change 
my debt into a debt of honor," and tore the note in pieces. 
Fox thanked the man for his confidence, and paid him, saying, 
"his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait." 
Lover of Liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African 
slave, he possessed a great personal popularity ; and Napoleon 
said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, 
" Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at 
the Tuileries." 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, 
whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The 
painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision 
on what we say. But I will neither be driven from allow- 
ance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief 
that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain that, if 
we can; but by all means we must affirm this. Life owes 
much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion which 
affects to be honor, is often, in all men's experience, only a 
ballroom-code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in 
the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is 
something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be 
supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything 
preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire 
in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity 
with which details of high life are read, betray the univer- 
sality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a 
comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowl- 
edged " first circles " and apply these terrific standards of 
justice, beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found 
there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants 
are not. Fashion has many classes and many rules of proba- 
tion and admission; and not the best alone. There is not 



MANNERS 221 

only the right of conquest, which genius pretends, — the in- 
dividual, demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the 
best; — but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion 
loves lions, and points, like Circe, to her horned company. 
This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and 
that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat ; here 
is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain 
Symmes, from the interior of the earth ; and Monsieur Jovaire, 
who came down this morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the 
reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the 
whole torrid zone in his Sunday-school ; and Signor Torre 
del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the 
Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul 
Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the 
new moon. — But these are monsters of one day, and to-mor- 
row will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for, in these 
rooms, every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, 
and, in general, the clerisy wins its way up into these places, 
and gets represented here, somewhat on this footing of con- 
quest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, 
spending a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being 
steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and dined, and in- 
troduced, and properly grounded in all the biography, and 
politics, and anecdotes of the boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be 
grotesque sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. 
Let the creed and commandments even have the saucy hom- 
age of parody. The forms of politeness universally express 
benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they are in the 
mouths of selfish men, and used as means of selfishness? 
What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out of the 
world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to ad- 
dress his companion, as civilly to exclude all others from 
his discourse, and also to make them feel excluded? Real 
service will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not 
j merely French and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed, 
; that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last distin- 
! guish God's gentleman from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir 
I Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age. 
" Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and per- 



222 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

suaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: 
what his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave him 
pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his chil- 
dren: and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole 
body." Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There 
is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing 
on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there 
is still some absurd inventor of charities; some guide and 
comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland; some 
Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the 
second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown 
old; some well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an 
ill-fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and 
impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these are 
the centres of society, on which it returns for fresh im- 
pulses. These are the creators of Fashion, which is an 
attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and 
the generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of 
this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and 
Washington, and every pure and valiant heart, who wor- 
shipped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who con- 
stitute the natural aristocracy, are not found in the actual 
aristocracy, or, only on its edge; as the chemical energy of 
the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spec- 
trum. Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who do 
not know their sovereign, when he appears. The theory of 
society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It 
divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods, — 

As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 

Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ; 

And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, 

In form and shape compact and beautiful ; 

So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads ; 

A power, more strong in beauty, born of us, 

And fated to excel us, as we pass 

In glory that old Darkness : 

for, 'tis the eternal law, 

That first in beauty shall be first in might. 

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society, there is 
a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and 



MANNERS 223 

flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal 
of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court, 
the parliament of love and chivalry. And this is constituted 
of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native, with 
the love of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to 
embellish the passing day. If the individuals who compose 
the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood 
of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that 
we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior, 
we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although ex- 
cellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify 
us in the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect of- 
fence. Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. 
There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious 
exclusion of impertinences will not avail. It must be genius 
which takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but 
courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction, as it is in 
fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted 
the demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. Cer- 
tainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some 
right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their 
mouths, before the days of Waverley ; but neither does Scott's 
dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart 
epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and 
does not please on the second reading: it is not warm with 
life. In Shakspeare alone, the speakers do not strut and 
bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many 
titles that of being the best-bred man in England, and in 
Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted 
to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a 
man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose 
character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A 
beautiful form is better than a beautiful face ; a beautiful be- 
havior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higher 
pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the 
fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the 
objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his 
countenance, he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, 
and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have 
seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within 



224 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, >/( 
but were original and commanding, and held out protection 
and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, 
but carried the holiday in his eye ; who exhilarated the fancy 
by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence ; who ) 
shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bear- 
ing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood ; yet with the port 
of an emperor, — if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand 
the gaze of millions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers, 
are the places where Man executes his will ; let him yield or 
divide the sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with 
her instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a love of 
trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of 
that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment, which is 
indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American in- 
stitutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment, I 
esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in 
women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in 
the men, may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of 
Woman's Rights. Certainly, let her be as much better placed 
in the laws and in social forms, as the most zealous reformer 
can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical 
nature, that I believe only herself can show us how she shall 
be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises 
her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies 
the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and,. by the firm- 
ness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces 
the coarsest calculators that another road exists, than that 
which their feet know. But besides those who make good 
in our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, 
are there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses 
to the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house 
with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose 
our tongues, and we speak ; who anoint our eyes, and we see ? 
We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our 
walls of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we 
were children playing with children in a wide field of flowers. 
Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, 
and we shall be sunny poets, and will write out in many- 



MANNERS 225 

colored words the romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or 
Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an ele- 
mental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when 
I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant 
joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful 
to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like 
air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities, 
that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where 
she is present, all others will be more than they are wont. 
She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, be- 
came her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please, 
than that you could say, her manners were marked with dig- 
nity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect de- 
meanor on each occasion. She did not study the Persian 
grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems 
of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For, though the 
bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet 
was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet intellectual 
persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them by her 
sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with 
all, all would show themselves noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, 
which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the 
contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not 
equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our 
society makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth who 
have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, and 
whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. 
They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy 
and relative : it is great by their allowance : its proudest 
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and vir- 
tue. For the present distress, however, of those who are 
j predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there 
i are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple of 
j miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most ex- 
| treme susceptibility. For, the advantages which fashion 
| values, are plants which thrive in very confined localities, 
I in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for 
l nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the 



226 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or sci- 
entific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or 
virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. 
The worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste 
for the emblem. Everything that is called fashion and cour- 
tesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, 
creator of titles and dignities, namely, the heart of love. 
This is the royal blood, this is the fire, which, in all countries 
and contingencies, will work after its kind, and conquer and 
expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to 
every. fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no gran- 
deur but. its own. What is rich ? Are you rich enough to 
help anybody ? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric ? 
rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itin- 
erant with his consul's paper which commends him " To the 
charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few broken words 
of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town 
to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or 
woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your 
house, from the general bleakness and stoniness ; to make such 
feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them 
both remember and hope ? What is vulgar, but to refuse the 
claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but 
to allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday from 
the national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an 
ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to be 
so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Os- 
man had a humanity so broad and deep, that although his 
speech was so bold and free with the Koran, as to disgust all 
the deverishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, 
or insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who 
had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his 
brain, but fled at once to him, — that great heart lay there 
so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country, that 
it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his 
side. And the madness which he harbored, he did not share. , 
Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich? 

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very 
ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand. It is 



I 



MANNERS 227 

easy to see, that what is called by distinction society and 
fashion, has good laws as well as bad, has much that is neces- 
sary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and 
too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the 
pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its character. " I 
overheard Jove, one day," said Silenus, "talking of destroy- 
ing the earth ; he said, it had failed ; they were all rogues and 
vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days suc- 
ceeded each other. Minerva sc,id, she hoped not; they were 
only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, 
that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or 
seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; 
if you called them good, they would appear so; and there 
was no person or action among them, which would not puz- 
zle her owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it 
was fundamentally bad or good." 



\ 



GIFTS 

(i8 44 ) 

Gifts of one who loved me, — 
'Twas high time they came ; 
When he ceased to love me, 
Time they stopped for shame. 

IT is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that 
the world owes the world more than the world can pay, 
and ought to go into chancery, and be sold. I do not think 
this general insolvency, which involves in some sort all the 
population, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at 
Christmas and New Year, and other times, in bestowing 
gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be generous, though 
very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the 
choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a 
present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to 
give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are 
always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud as- 
sertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the 
world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern 
countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard 
out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us: we are 
children, not pets : she is not fond : everything is dealt to us 
without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet 
these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of 
love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery, 
even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that 
we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like 
that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom these 
sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptable gifts, be- 
cause they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fan- 
tastic values being attached to them. If a man should send 
(229) o • hc v 



230 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

to me to come a hundred miles to visit him, and should set 
before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, I should think there 
was some proportion between the labor and the reward. 

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty 
every day, and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no 
option, since if the man at the door have no shoes, you have 
not to consider whether you could procure him a paint-box. 
And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink 
water, in the house or out of doors, so it is always a great 
satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity does every- 
thing well. In our condition of universal dependence, it 
seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his neces- 
sity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconve- 
nience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others 
the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I 
should prefer playing to that of the Furies. /Next to things 
of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends 
prescribed, is, that we might convey to some person that 
which properly belonged to his character, and was easily 
associated with him in thought. But our tokens of com- 
pliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings 
and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The 
only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. 
Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; 
the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and 
shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of 
her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores 
society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography 
is conveyed in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index 
of his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go 
to the shops to buy me something, which does not represent 
your life and talent, but a goldsmith's. This is fit for kings, 
and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of prop- 
erty, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of 
symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black-mail. / 

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires 
careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man 
to receive gifts. How dare you give them ? We wish to be 
self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand 
that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can re- 



GIFTS 231 

ceive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it 
from ourselves ; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. 
We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there 
seems something of degrading dependence in living by it. 

Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, 

Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take. 

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We ar- 
raign society, if it do not give us besides earth, and fire, and 
water, opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of veneration. 
He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are 
either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbe- 
coming. Some violence, I think, is done, some degradation 
borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when 
my independence is invaded or when a gift comes from such 
as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; 
and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be 
ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I 
love his commodity and not him. The gift, to be true, must 
be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my 
flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my 
goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine 
his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil, or 
this flagon of wine, when all your oil and wine is mine, 
which belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hence the 
fitness of beautiful, not useful things for gifts. This giving 
is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is un- 
grateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all con- 
sidering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater 
store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the 
beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord Timon. For, the 
expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished 
by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great 
happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from 
one who has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a 
very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor 
naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these 
gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who 
never thanks, and who says, " Do not flatter your bene- 
factors." 



232 GIFTS 

The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there 
is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You 
cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you 
have served him, he. at once puts you in debt by his mag- 
nanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial 
and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend 
stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun 
to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good- 
will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to ren- 
der him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, 
good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we 
can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who 
would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and 
humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must 
be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satis- 
faction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. 
But rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowing 
it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people. 

I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, 
which is the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must 
not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower- 
leaves indifferently. There are persons, from whom we al- 
ways expect fairy tokens; let us not cease to expect them. 
This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal 
rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought 
and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also 
not in the will but in fate. I find that I am not much to you ; 
you do not need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust 
out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No 
services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have 
attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an 
intellectual trick, — no more. They eat your service like 
apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, 
and delight in you all the time. 



NATURE 

(1844) 

The rounded world is fair to see, 

Nine time folded in mystery : 

Though baffled seers cannot impart 

The secret of its laboring heart, 

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast, 

And all is clear from east to west, 

Spirit that lurks each form within 

Beckons to spirit of its kin ; 

Self-kindled every atom glows, 

And hints the future which it owes. 

THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost 
any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its 
perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the 
earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her off- 
spring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, noth- 
ing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, 
and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba ; when 
everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the 
cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil 
thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little 
more assurance in that pure October weather, which we dis- 
tinguish by the name of the Indian Summer. The day, im- 
measurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide 
fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems 
longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite 
lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the 
world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and 
small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off 
his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. 
Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality 
which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the 

233 



234 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and 
judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept 
out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morn- 
ing, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their 
bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which 
render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistica- 
tion and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us. 
The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, 
and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells 
of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, 
and oaks, almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The 
incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, 
and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or 
church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the 
immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the 
opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts 
fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection 
of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated 
by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph 
by nature. 

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. 
These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come 
to our own, and make friends with matter, which the am- 
bitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. 
We never can part with it ; the mind loves its old home : as 
water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, 
and hands, and feet. It is firm water : it is cold flame : what 
health, what affinity ! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear 
friend and brother, when we chat affectedly with strangers, 
comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, 
and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the 
human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to 
feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, 
just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees 
of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, 
up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagina- 
tion and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from 
the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes 
for safety, — and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of 
noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites 



NATURE 235 

from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the 
heavenly bodies, which calls us to solitude, and fortell the 
remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which ro- 
mance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away 
into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with 
Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would 
remain of our furniture. 

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which 
we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of 
snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its per- 
fect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, 
and over plains, the waving rye-field, the mimic waving of 
acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and 
ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers 
in glassy lakes ; the musical steaming odorous south wind, 
which converts all trees to windharps; the crackling and 
spurting of hemlock in the flames ; or of pine logs, which 
yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room, — 
these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. 
My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on 
the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the 
shore of our little river ; and with one stroke of the paddle, 
I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the 
world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a 
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost 
for spotted man to enter without noviciate and probation. 
We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty: we dip our 
hands in this painted element: our eyes are bathed in these 
lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, 
the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and 
beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, estab- 
lishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these 
delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable 
glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness 
of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art 
and luxury have early learned that they must work as en- 
chantment and sequel to this original beauty. I am over- 
instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to 
please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive 
and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: 



236 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who 
knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are 
in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how 
to come to these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. 
Only as far as the masters of the world have called in 
nature to their aid, can they reach the height of mag- 
nificence. This is the meaning of their hanging gardens, 
villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back 
their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I 
do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible 
in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe 
and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, 
but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret prom- 
ises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his 
villa, his grove, his wine, and his company, but the provoca- 
tion and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling 
stars. In their soft glances, I see what men strove to 
realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. In- 
deed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue 
sky for the background, which save all our works of art, 
which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor 
with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the 
effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on 
imaginative minds. Ah ! if the rich were rich as the poor 
fancy riches ! A boy hears a military band play on the field 
at night, and he has kings and queens, and famous chivalry 
palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a 
hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which 
converts the mountains into an iEolian harp, and this super- 
natural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, 
Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters, and huntresses. Can 
a musical note to be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful I To the 
poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he 
is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake 
of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they 
were not rich ! That they have some high-fenced grove, 
which they call a park; that they live in larger and better- 
garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, 
keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places, 
and to distant cities, are the groundwork from which he 



NATURE 237 

has delineated estates of romance, compared with which 
their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The 
muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of 
wealth and well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, 
and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — a certain 
haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a 
kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the 
air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes 
so easily, may not be always found, but the material land- 
scape is never far off. We can find these enchantments 
without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. 
We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every land- 
scape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky 
and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well 
as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night 
stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all 
the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Cam- 
pagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled 
clouds and the colors of morning and evening, will trans- 
figure maples and alders. The difference between landscape 
and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the 
beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular 
landscape, as the necessity of being beautiful under which 
every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in un- 
dress. Beauty breaks in everywhere. 

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on 
this topic, which schoolmen called natura naturata, or 
nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without 
excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is 
called "the subject of religion." A susceptible person does 
not like to indulge his tastes in this kind, without the apol- 
ogy of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or 
to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a 
remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece, or a fishing- 
rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A 
dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop 
of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men 
are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and 
I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians 



238 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

should furnish facts for, would take place in the most 
sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the " Wreaths " and 
" Flora's chaplets " of the book-shops; yet ordinarily, whether 
we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever 
cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall 
into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who 
ought to be represented in the mythology as the most con- 
tinent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admi- 
rable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce 
the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude 
of false churches accredits the true religion. Literature, 
poetry, science, are the homage of man to this unfathomed 
secret, concerning which no sane man can affect an in- 
difference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best 
in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather 
because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything 
that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of 
nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the 
landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If 
there were good men, there would never be this rapture in 
nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the 
walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with 
grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find 
relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures 
and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly 
separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, 
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is insep- 
arable from our protest against false society. Man is 
fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermom- 
eter, detecting the presence or absence of the divine senti- 
ment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we 
are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, 
nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with 
compunction : if our own life flowed with the right energy, 
we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles 
with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. 
Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to 
the selfish becomes astrology. Psychology, mesmerism 
(with intent to show where our spoons are gone) ; and 
anatomy and physiology, become phrenology and palmistry. 



NATURE 239 

But taking timely warning, and leaving many things un- 
said on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to 
the Efficient Nature, natura natnrans, the quick cause, be- 
fore which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, 
its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the 
ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in 
undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reach- 
ing from particles and spicula, through transformation on 
transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at con- 
summate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, 
that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald, 
dazzling white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the 
prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, 
by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space 
and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secu- 
larly of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school 
measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes 
for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want 
of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must 
round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the 
rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated 
the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door 
for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come 
in. How far off yet is the trilobite ! how far the quadruped ! 
how inconceivably remote is man ! All duly arrive, and 
then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite 
to the oyster ; farther yet to Plato, and the preaching of the 
immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as 
the first atom has two sides. 

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and 
second secrets of nature : Motion and Rest. The whole 
code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the 
signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a 
brook, admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. 
Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made 
to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler 
shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at 
last at the most complex form; and yet so poor is nature 
with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of 
the universe, she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its 



240 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound 
it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still 
one stuff, and betrays the same properties. 

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contra- 
vene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to 
transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its 
place and living in the earth, and, at the same time, she 
arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists 
to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with 
a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The 
direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back 
for materials, and begins again with the first elements on 
the most advanced stage: otherwise, all goes to ruin. If 
we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system 
in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels 
of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward toward 
consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to 
bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The ani- 
mal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. 
The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from 
the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and 
ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come 
to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers 
so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come 
to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: 
we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. 
The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our 
ridiculous tenderness. 

Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill 
of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties 
of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a 
bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the 
necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That 
identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great^ in- 
tervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations 
from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. 
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace 
has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, 
omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there 
amid essences and billets-doux, to Himmaleh mountain- 



NATURE 241 

chains, and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much 
we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, 
as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, 
and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the 
house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. 
The cool disengaged air of natural objects, makes them 
enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, 
and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we camp out 
and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks, and 
the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in 
chairs of ivory on carpets of silk. 

This guilding identity runs through all the surprises and 
contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man 
carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chem- 
istry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature 
is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and 
discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural 
science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, be- 
fore it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe 
without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions 
of nature : moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry 
and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recog- 
nizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The 
common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and Black, is the 
same common sense which made the arrangements which 
now it discovers. 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter 
action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, 
" Give us matter and a little motion, and we will construct 
the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, 
we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the 
mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and cen- 
tripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and 
we can show how all this mighty order grew." — "A very 
unreasonable postulate," said the metaphysicians, " and a 
plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to 
know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation 
of it ? " Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the dis- 
cussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the 
balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the 



242 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is 
no end to the consequences of the act. That famous abo- 
riginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the 
system, and through every atom of every ball, through all 
the races of creatures, and through the history and per- 
formances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the 
course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into 
the world, without adding a small excess of his proper qual- 
ity. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the im- 
pulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence 
of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; 
in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. 
Without electricity the air would rot, and without this vio- 
lence of direction, which men and women have, without a 
spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We 
aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some 
falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now and then 
comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry 
a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret; 
— how then? is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature 
sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with 
a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their 
several aim; makes them a little wrong-headed in that direc- 
tion in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again 
with new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child 
witE his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded 
by every sight and sound, without any power to compare 
and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted 
chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualiz- 
ing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every 
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, 
which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. 
But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, 
dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has 
secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all 
these attitudes and exertions, — an end of the first impor- 
tance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect 
than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round 
the top of every toy to his eyes, to ensure his fidelity, and 
he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept 



NATURE 243 

alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, 
we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat 
is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does 
not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a 
single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality 
of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant 
themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live 
to maturity, that, at least, one may replace the parent. All 
things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of 
fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrink- 
ing from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden 
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, 
from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in mar- 
riage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospec- 
tive end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, 
namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race. 

But the craft with which the world is made, runs also 
into the mind and character of men. /No man is quite sane ; 
each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight deter- 
mination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him 
hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. 
Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause 
is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, 
and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not 
less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the im- 
portance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the 
prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any 
hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self- 
complacent Luther declares with an emphasis, not to be 
mistaken, that " God himself cannot do without wise men." 
Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in 
the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James 
Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. 
Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his 
thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However 
this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps 
them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and pub- 
licity to their words. A similar experience is not infre- 
quent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes 
a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence 



244 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, 
to him, burning and fragrant: he reads them on his knees 
by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with 
his tears: they are sacred; too good for the world, and 
hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the 
man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates 
in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After 
some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend 
to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with 
firmness, exposes the pages to his view. Will they not burn 
his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes 
from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, 
which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexa- 
tion. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights 
of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and 
of light, have engraved their shadowy characters on that 
tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart 
of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet 
credit that one may have impressive experience, and yet 
may not know how to put his private fact into literature; 
and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues 
and ministers than we, that though we should hold our 
peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, might check 
injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak, 
so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and 
inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so, 
whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the in- 
stinctive and particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts 
his mouth in disgust. For, no man can write anything, 
who does not think that what he writes is for the time 
the history of the world; or do anything well, who does not 
esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be 
of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not 
do it with impunity. 

In like manner, there is throughout nature something 
mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives 
nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the 
performance. We live in a system of approximations. 
Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also 
temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are 



NATURE 245 

encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst 
lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and 
cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after 
the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and 
performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself 
are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for 
wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager 
pursuer. What is the end sought ? Plainly to secure the 
ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of de- 
formity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose 
method ! What a train of means to secure a little conver- 
sation ! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this 
kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock, 
and file of mortgages ; trade to all the world, country-house 
and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, 
high, clear, and spiritual ! Could it not be had as well by 
beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from 
successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from 
the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, 
character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it ap- 
peased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, 
silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a 
warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner- 
table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, 
were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and 
virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could 
lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter 
days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these 
inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this 
object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove 
friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of 
rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the govern- 
ments generally of the world, are cities and governments 
of the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men, that 
is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule Of the class, 
that they arrive- with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; 
when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who 
has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his 
speech, and now has forgotten what he meant to say. The 
appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, 

p HCV 



246 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and 
cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of men? 

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be 
expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of ex- 
ternal nature. There is in woods and waters a certain en- 
ticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a pres- 
ent satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every land- 
scape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer- 
clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, 
their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared 
not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as for look- 
ing to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It 
is an odd jealousy: but the poet finds himself not near 
enough to his object. The pine-tree, the Aver, the bank of 
flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is 
still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt ^nd far-off reflec- 
tion and echo of the triumph that has passed by, and is now 
at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neigh- 
boring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent 
woods. The present object shall give you this sense of still- 
ness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What 
splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveli- 
ness in the sunset ! But who can go where they are, or lay 
his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the 
round world forever and ever. It is the same among the 
men and women, as among the silent trees, always a referred 
existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is 
it, that beauty can never be grasped ? in persons and in land- 
scape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed 
lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her accept- 
ance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a 
star : she cannot be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he. 

What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that 
first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so 
many well-meaning creatures ? Must we not suppose some- 
where in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are 
we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is 
made of us ? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature ? One 
look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at 
rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, 



NATURE 247 

nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be 
rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an 
(Edipus arrives : he has the whole mystery teeming in his 
brain. Alas ! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill ; no syl- 
lable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like 
the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was 
yet strong enough to follow it, and report of the return of 
the curve. But it also appears, that our actions are seconded 
and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We 
are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, 
and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot 
bandy words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with 
persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers, 
we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuper- 
able destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with 
the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams 
through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling 
first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and 
chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre-existing within us in 
their highest form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in 
the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too 
much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the 
drag is never taken from the wheel. Whenever the impulse 
exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. 
All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self- 
heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and 
furies of its hours ; and though we are always engaged with 
particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to 
every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while 
they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature 
forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the 
insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into a 
hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from 
the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon ; the new engine 
brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro- 
magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst 
your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our 
modern aims and endeavors, — of our condensation and ac- 
celeration of objects: but nothing is gained: nature cannot 



248 NATURE 

be cheated : man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they 
swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities, 
however, we find our advantage, not less than in the im- 
pulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that 
side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of 
being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some 
stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, 
which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and liter- 
ally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the im- 
mortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the 
report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The 
divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the in- 
carnation of a thought, and turns to a thought, again, as ice 
becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and 
the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state 
of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the in- 
fluence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or 
organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegeta- 
tive, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does 
not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle 
its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and 
distils its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment 
instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every 
form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us 
as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, 
melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not 
guess its essence, until after a long time. 






PC 



Facsimile of the first page of 

an Emerson manuscript, now published 

for the first time, from the original 

in the possession of 

Dr. Edward W, Emerson, 

Concord, Mass. * 



^nH^<^\ 






a 



POLITICS 

(i8 44 ) 



Gold and iron are good 
To buy iron and gold ; 
All earth's fleece and food 
For their like are sold. 
Boded Merlin wise, 
Proved Napoleon great, — 
Nor kind nor coinage buys 
Aught above its rate. 
Fear, Craft, and Avarice 
Cannot rear a State. 
Out of dust to build 
What is more than dust, — 
Walls Amphion piled 



Phoebus stablish must. 

When the Muses nine 

With the Virtues meet, * 

Find to their design 

An Atlantic seat, 

By green orchard boughs 

Fended from the heat, 

Where the statesman ploughs 

Furrow for the wheat ; 

When the Church is social worth, 

When the state-house is the hearth, 

Then the perfect State is come, 

The republican at home. 



IN dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its 
institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed be- 
fore we were born: that they are not superior to the 
citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single 
man: every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet 
a particular case ; that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we 
may make as good; we may make better. Society is an il- 
lusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid re- 
pose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted like 
oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves 
the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society 
is fluid ; there are no such roots and centres ; but any particle 
may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and com- 
pel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong 
will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and 
every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever. But 
politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated 
with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who be- 
lieve that the laws make the city, that grave modifications 

249 



250 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the 
population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be 
voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were ab- 
surd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get suf- 
ficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that 
foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the 
twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead the char- 
acter and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is 
quickly got rid of; and they only who built on Ideas, build 
for eternity ; and that the form of government which prevails, 
is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population 
which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are 
superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life 
as it has in the character of living men, is its force. The 
statute stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, 
but how feel ye this article to-day? Our statute is a cur- 
rency, which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon be- 
comes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to 
the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited monarchical, 
but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of 
her authority, by the pertest of her sons : and as fast as the 
public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen 
to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and 
must be made to. Meantime the education of the general 
mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are 
prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, 
and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, 
shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall 
be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict 
and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment 
for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new 
prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in 
coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a 
distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration. 

The theory of politics, which has possessed the mind of 
men, and which they have expressed the best they could in 
their laws and in their revolutions, considers persons and 
property as the two objects for whose protection government 
exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being 
identical in nature. This interest, of course, with its whole 



POLITICS 251 

power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as 
persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their 
rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his 
clothes, and another owns a county. This accident, depend- 
ing, primarily, on the skill and virtue of the parties, of 
which there is every degree, and secondarily, on patrimony, 
falls unequally, and its rights, of course, are unequal. Per- 
sonal rights, universally the same, demand a government 
framed on the ratio of the census : property demands a gov- 
ernment framed on the ratio of owners and of owning. 
Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after 
by an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive 
them off, and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks 
or herds, and no fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax 
to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should 
have equal rights to elect the officer, who is to defend their 
persons, but that Laban and not Jacob, should elect the officer 
who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And, if question arise 
whether additional officers or watch-towers should be pro- 
vided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell 
part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better 
of this, and with more right, than Jacob, who, because he is 
a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his own? 

In the earliest society the proprietors made their own 
wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in the direct 
way, no other opinion would arise in any equitable com- 
munity, than that property should make the law for prop- 
erty, and persons the law for persons. 

But property passes through donation or inheritance to 
those who do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as 
really the new owner's, as labor made it the first owner's : 
in the other case, of patrimony, the law makes an owner- 
ship, which will be valid in each man's view according to the 
estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity. 

It was not, however, found easy to embody the readily ad- 
mitted principle, that property should make law for property, 
and persons for persons : since persons and property mixed 
themselves in every transaction. At last it seems settled, 
that the rightful distinction was, that the proprietors should 
have more elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the 



252 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Spartan principle of " calling that which is just, equal; not 
that which is equal, just." 

That principle no longer looks so self evident as it ap- 
peared in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen 
whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws, 
to property, and such a structure given to our usages, as al- 
lowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them 
poor; but mainly, because there is an instinctive sense, how- 
ever obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution 
of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its in- 
fluence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly, 
the only interest for the consideration of the State, is per- 
sons; that property will always follow persons; that the high- 
est end of government is the culture of men : and if men 
can be educated, the institutions will share their improve- 
ment, and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the 
peril is less when we take note of our natural defences. We 
are kept by better guards than the vigilance of such magis- 
trates as we commonly elect. Society always consists, in 
greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who 
have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, 
die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their 
own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such 
an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run 
to ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which the folly 
and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their 
laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with. 
Property will be protected. Corn will not grow, unless it is 
planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe 
it, unless the chances are a hundred to one, that he will cut 
and harvest it. Under any forms, persons and property must 
and will have their just sway. They exert their power, as 
steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of earth 
never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it ; melt it to liquid, 
convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound: it will al- 
ways attract and resist other matter, by the full virtue of 
one pound weight; — and the attributes of a person, his wit 
and his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or extin- 
guishing tyranny, their proper force, — if not overtly, then 



POLITICS 253 

covertly; if not for the law, then against it; with right, or 
by might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to 
fix, as persons are organs of moral or supernatural force. 
Under the dominion of an idea,, which possesses the minds 
of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, 
the powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. 
A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, 
can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve 
extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means ; as, 
the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the 
French have done. 

In like manner, to every particle of property belongs its 
own attraction. A cent is the representative of a certain 
quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in the 
necessities of the animal man. It is so much warmth, so 
much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may do 
what it will with the owner of property, its just power will 
still attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say, 
that all shall have power except the owners of property : they 
shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the prop- 
erty will, year after year, write every statute that respects 
property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the pro- 
prietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of 
property will do, either through the law, or else in defiance 
of it. Of course, I speak of all the property, not merely of 
the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently 
happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds 
their accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is 
only a cow, or a wheelbarrow, or his arms, and so has that 
property to dispose of. 

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and 
property against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, 
determines the form and methods of governing, which are 
proper to each nation, and to its habit of thought, and nowise 
transferable to other states of society. In this country, we 
are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular 
in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, 
from the character and condition of the people, which they 
still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously 



254 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

prefer them to any other in history. They are not better, 
but only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting the ad- 
vantage in modern times of the democratic form, but to other 
states of society, in which religion consecrated the mon- 
archical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is 
better for us, because the religious sentiment of the present 
time accords better with it. Born democrats, we are nowise 
qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living 
in the monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our 
institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, 
have not any exemption from the practical defects which 
have discredited other forms. Every actual State is cor- 
rupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What 
satire on government can equal the severity of censure con- 
veyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified 
cunning, intimating that the State is a trick? 

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse 
appear in the parties into which each State divides itself 
of opponents and defenders of the administration of the 
government. Parties are also founded on instincts, and have 
better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of 
their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but 
rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as 
wisely reprove the east wind, or the frost, as a political party, 
whose members, for the most part, could give no account 
of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests 
in which they find themselves. Our quarrel with them be- 
gins, when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding 
of some leader, and, obeying personal considerations, throw 
themselves into the maintenance and defence of points, no- 
wise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually cor- 
rupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association 
from dishonesty* we cannot extend the same character to 
their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and 
zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily, our parties 
are parties of circumstance, and not of principle; as, the 
planting interest in conflict with the commercial ; the party 
of capitalists, and that of operatives ; parties which are iden- 
tical in their moral character, and which can easily change 
ground with each other, in the support of many of their meas- 



POLITICS 255 

ures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of 
free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of 
abolition of capital punishment, degenerate into personalities, 
or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties 
in this country (which may be cited as a fair specimen of these 
societies of opinion) is, that they do not plant themselves 
on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are re- 
spectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carry- 
ing of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to 
the commonwealth. Of the two great parties, which, at this 
hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say, 
that, one has the best cause, and the other contains the best 
men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will, 
of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free- 
trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties 
in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the 
access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth 
and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the 
so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of 
these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which 
give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. 
The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and 
aimless: it is not loving, it has no ulterior and divine ends; 
but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the 
other side, the conservative party, composed of the most mod- 
erate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, 
and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it 
aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no 
generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the 
arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encour- 
age science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, 
or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when 
in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, 
or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the 
nation. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are 
not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of 
ferocious parties, human nature always finds itself cherished, 
as the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to 
have as healthy a moral sentiment as other children. Citi- 



256 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

zens of feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institu- 
tions lapsing into anarchy; and the older and more cautious 
among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look with 
some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our 
license of construing the Constitution and in the despotism 
of public opinion, we have no anchor.; and one foreign ob- 
server thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of 
Marriage among us ; and another thinks he has found it in 
our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security 
more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, 
saying, " that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails 
well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the 
bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, 
but then your feet are always in water." No forms can 
have any dangerous importance, whilst we are befriended 
by the laws of things. It makes no difference how many 
tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long 
as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment 
the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as 
long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, 
of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and 
each force by its own activity develops the other. Wild 
liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by 
strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. 
" Lynch-law " prevails only where there is greater hardihood 
and self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be a per- 
manency: everybody's interest requires that it should not 
exist, and only justice satisfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which 
shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in 
them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or rail- 
roads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be a 
transcript of the common conscience. Governments have 
their origin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one 
is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. There 
is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they never 
so many, or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a 
sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his 
own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these 
decisions all the citizens find a perfect agreement, and only 



POLITICS 257 

in these; not in what is good to eat, good to wear, good use 
of time, or what amount of land, or of public aid, each is 
entitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently en- 
deavor to make application of, to the measuring of land, the 
apportionment of service, the protection of life and property. 
Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet ab- 
solute right is the first governor ; or, every government is 
an impure theocracy. The idea, after which each community 
is aiming to make and mend its law, is, the will of the wise 
man. The wise man, it cannot find in nature, and it makes 
awkward but earnest efforts to secure his government by 
contrivance ; as, by causing the entire people to give their 
voices on every measure; or, by a double choice to get the 
representation of the whole ; or, by a selection of the best 
citizens; or, to secure the advantages of efficiency and in- 
ternal peace, by confiding the government to one, who may 
himself select his agents. All forms of government symbolize 
an immortal government, common to all dynasties and in- 
dependent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect 
where there is only one man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of 
the character of his fellows. My right and my wrong, is 
their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, 
and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often 
agree in our means, and work together for a time to one 
end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not suf- 
ficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I over- 
step the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may 
have so much more skill or strength than he, that he cannot 
express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and 
hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot 
maintain the assumption: it must be executed by a practical 
lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for another, is the 
blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments 
of the world. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a 
pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough 
a great difference between my setting myself down to a 
self-control, and my going to make somebody else act after 
my views: but when a quarter of the human race assume 
to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by 



258 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their 
command. Therefore, all public ends look vague and quixotic 
beside private ones. For, any laws but those which men 
make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the 
place of my child, and we stand in one thought, and see that 
things are thus or thus, that perception is law for him and 
me. We are both there, both act. But if, without carrying 
him into the thought, I look over into his plot, and guessing 
how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will never obey 
me. This is the history of governments, — one man does 
something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be 
acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, or- 
dains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whim- 
sical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the 
consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the 
taxes. What a satire is this on government ! Everywhere 
they think they get their money's worth, except for these. 

Hence, the less government we have, the better, — the 
fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to 
this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private 
character, the growth of the Individual; the reappearance of 
the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the 
wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be 
owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend 
to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, 
go to form and deliver, is character ; that is the end of nature, 
to reach unto this coronation, of her king. To educate the 
wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the 
wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character 
makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. 
He needs no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well; 
no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no 
vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no 
library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is 
a prophet ; no statute book, for he is the law-giver ; no money, 
for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no 
experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him and 
looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who 
has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, 
needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a 



: 



POLITICS 259 

select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his 
memory is myrrh to them ; his presence, frankincense and 
flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are 
yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In 
our barbarous society the influence of character is in its 
infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is 
to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly 
yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; the An- 
nual Register is silent; in the Conversations' Lexicon, it is 
not set down; the President's Message, the Queen's Speech, 
have not mentioned it ; and yet it is never nothing. Every 
thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters 
the world. The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through 
all their frocks of force and simulation, the presence of 
worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition are 
confession of this divinity; and successes in those fields are 
the poor amends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul at- 
tempts to hide its nakedness. I find the like unwilling hom- 
age in all quarters. It is because we know how much is 
due from us that we are impatient to show some petty talent 
as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience 
of this right to grandeur of character, and are false to it. 
But each of us has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or 
graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we 
do, as an apology to others and to ourselves, for not reach- 
ing the mark of a good and equal life. But it does not 
satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on the notice of our companions. 
It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our own 
brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk 
abroad. W T e do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort 
of expiation, and we are constrained to reflect on our splendid 
moment, with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, 
and not as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our 
permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in society 
with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, " I am not 
all here." Senators and presidents have climbed so high 
with pain enough, not because they think the place specially 
agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate 
their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their 



260 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard 
nature. They must do what they can. Like one class of 
forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail : climb 
they must or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured 
that he could enter into strict relations with the best persons, 
and make life serene around him by the dignity and sweetness 
of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of 
the caucus and the press, and covert relations so hollow and 
pompous, as those of a politician? Surely nobody would be 
a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere. 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-govern- 
ment, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards 
and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more 
energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial re- 
straints. The movement in this direction has been very 
marked in modern history. Much has been blind and dis- 
creditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected 
by the vices of the revolters ; for this is a purely moral force. 
It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can 
be. It separates the individual from all party, and unites 
him, at the same time, to the race. It promises a recognition 
of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the secur- 
ity of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be 
trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as 
the bass of a State, has never been tried. We must not im- 
agine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every 
tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain 
social conventions : nor doubt that roads can be built, letters 
carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the govern- 
ment of force is at an end. Are our methods now so excel- 
lent that all competition is hopeless? Could not a nation 
of friends even devise better ways? On the other hand, let 
not the most conservative and timid fear anything from a 
premature surrender of the bayonet, and the system of force. 
For, according to the order of nature, which is quite su- 
perior to our will, it stands thus; there will always be a 
government of force, where men are selfish; and when they 
are pure enough to abjure the code of force, they will be 
wise enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of 
the highway, of commerce, and the exchange of property, 



POLITICS 261 

of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science, 
can be answered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling 
tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, 
among the most religious and instructed men of the most 
religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment, 
and a sufficient belief in the unity of things to persuade them 
that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, 
as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might 
be reasonable, and a good neighbor, without the hint of a 
jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there never was 
in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to in- 
spire him with the broad design of renovating the State on 
the principle of right and love. All those who have pretended 
this design, have been partial reformers, and have admitted 
in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do not 
call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied 
the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his own 
moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of fate 
as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air- 
pictures. If the individual who exhibits them, dare to think 
them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and 
men of talent, and women of superior sentiments, cannot hide 
their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill 
the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and 
there are now men, — if indeed I can speak in the plural 
number, — more exactly, I will say, I have just been convers- 
ing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience 
will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands 
of human beings might exercise towards each other the 
grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, 
or a pair of lovers. 



HCV 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 



A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORY HALL 
ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1 844. 

WHOEVER has had opportunity of acquaintance 
with society in New England during the last 
twenty-five years, with those middle and with 
those leading sections that may constitute any just repre- 
sentation of the character and aim of the community, will 
have been struck with the great activity of thought and 
experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the 
signs that the Church or religious party is falling from 
the church nominal, and is appearing in temperance and 
non-resistance societies, in movements of abolitionists and 
of socialists, and in very significant assemblies, called Sab- 
bath and Bible Conventions — composed of ultraists, of seek- 
ers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting 
to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the 
priesthood, and of the church. In these movements nothing 
was more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the 
movers. The spirit of protest and of detachment drove the 
members of these Conventions to bear testimony against the 
church, and immediately afterward to declare their dis- 
content with these Conventions, their independence of their 
colleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby 
they were working. They defied each other, like a congress 
of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his 
own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of 
projects for the salvation of the world ! One apostle 
thought all men should go to farming; and another, that no 
man should buy or sell : that the use of money was the 
cardinal evil; another, that the mischief was in our diet, 

263 



264 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened 
bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was 
in vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast as well 
as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves 
vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine ele- 
ment in the grain and makes it more palatable and more 
digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but 
it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant 
advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! 
Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of ani- 
mal manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over brute 
nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be 
taken from the plow and the horse from the cart, the hun- 
dred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must 
walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. 
Even the insect world was to be defended, that had been 
too long neglected, and a society for the protection of 
ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated 
without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoe- 
opathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology and 
their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles ! Others 
assailed particular vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of 
the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the 
scholar. Others attacked the institution of marriage, as the 
fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the 
worrying of churches and meetings for public worship ; and 
the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans 
seemed to have their match in the plenty of the new harvest 
of reform. 

With this din of opinion and debate, there was a keener 
scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than any ve had 
known, there was sincere protesting against existing evils, 
there were changes of employment dictated by conscience. 
No doubt, there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of back- 
sliding might occur. But in each of these movements 
emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption of sim- 
pler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the 
private man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius 
of the age, what happened in one instance, when a church 
censured and threatened to excommunicate one of its 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 265 

members on account of the somewhat hostile part to the 
church which his conscience led him to take in the anti- 
slavery business; the threatened individual immediately 
excommunicated the church in a public and formal process. 
This has been several times repeated : it was excellent when 
it was done the first time, but, of course, loses all value when 
it is copied. Every project in the history of reform, no 
matter how violent and surprising, is good when it is the 
dictate of man's genius and constitution, but very dull and 
suspicious when adopted from another. It is right and beau- 
tiful in any man to say : " I will take this coat, or this book, 
or this measure of corn of yours " — in whom we see the 
act to be original, and to flow from the whole spirit and 
faith of him ; for then that taking will have a giving as free 
and divine ; but we are very easily disposed to resist the 
same generosity of speech, when we miss originality and 
truth to character in it. 

There was in all the practical activities of New England, 
for the last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of 
tender consciences from the social organization. There is 
observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and 
spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful 
and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts. 

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the progress of 
dissent. The country is full of rebellion; the country is 
full of kings. Hands off ! let there be no control and no 
interference in the administration of the affairs of this king- 
dom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the 
party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experi- 
ment, in the face of what appear incontestable facts. I con- 
fess the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me 
that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below 
it in its columns, " The world is governed too much." So 
the country is frequently affording solitary examples of re- 
sistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw 
themselves on their reserved rights : nay, who have reserved 
all their rights ; who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk 
of court, that they do not know the State ; and embarrass the 
courts of law, by non-juring, and the commander-in-chief of 
the militia, by non-resistance. 



266 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in 
civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, 
prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected 
quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my 
coat? Why should professional labor and that of the count- 
ing-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the 
porter and wood-sawyer? This whole business of Trade 
causes me to pause and think, as it constitutes false rela- 
tions between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself 
relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to 
that person whom I pay with money, whereas if I had not 
that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all 
companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being 
himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids 
and services which each ask of the other. Am I not too 
protected a person? Is there not a wide disparity between the 
lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor 
sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss 
of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergencies 
of poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful or exalting 
in the smooth conventions of society ; I do not like the close 
air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, 
though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a 
destructive tax in my conformity. 

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts 
for the reform of Education. The popular education has 
been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was com- 
plained that an education to things was not given. We are 
students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, 
and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out 
at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not 
know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our 
eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the 
woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour 
of day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We 
are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a 
spider. The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that 
he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, " All 
summer in the fields, and all winter in the study." And it 
seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish or to hunt, 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 267 

that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be 
painful to his friends and fellow men. The lessons of science 
should be experimental also. The sight of the planet through 
a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy : the shock 
of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all the theories ; 
the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial 
volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it 
fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The 
ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain 
wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and always will 
draw, certain likeminded men — Greek men, and Roman men 
— in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsi- 
ness of usage, they had exacted the study of all men. Once 
(say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict rela- 
tion to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and 
the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of 
activity in physical science. These things became stereotyped 
as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit 
never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys 
were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had 
quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and was 
now creating and feeding other matters at other ends of the 
world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges this war- 
fare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten 
years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he 
leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts 
those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men 
are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and 
the persons who at forty years still read Greek can all be 
counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five 
persons I have seen who read Plato. 

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this 
country should be directed in its best years on studies which 
lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelli- 
gent person said or thought : " Is that Greek and Latin some 
spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If the 
physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at 
their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring 
is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating and 



268 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

go straight to affairs." So they jumped the Greek and Latin, 
and read law, medicine or sermons without it. To the as- 
tonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at 
once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few 
months the most conservative circles of Boston and New 
York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was col- 
lege-bred and who was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical specula- 
tion and in the rudest democratical movements, through all 
the petulance and all the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast 
aside the superfluous and arrive at short methods, urged, as 
I suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is equal to 
all energies, alone, and that man is more often injured than 
helped by the means he uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and 
the indication of growing trust in the private, self-supplied 
powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of 
the recent philosophy ; and that it is feeling its own profound 
truth and is reaching forward at this very hour to the hap- 
piest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every 
period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial 
and protest ; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid 
of by those who were reared in the old, before they could 
begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes 
in his removal of rubbish — and that makes the offensiveness 
of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the 
work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on 
the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on 
some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of bene- 
fit. It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors 
of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man 
be in his senses. 

The criticism and attack on institutions which we have 
witnessed has made one thing plain, that society gains noth- 
ing while a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate 
things around him; he has become tediously good in some 
particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest ; and hypocrisy 
and vanity are often the disgusting result. 

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better 
than the establishment, and conduct that in the best man- 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 269 

ner, than to make a sally against evil by some single im- 
provement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. 
Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think 
there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part 
of society or of life better than any other part. All our 
things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil 
washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our 
Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our education, 
our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain 
of the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give such im- 
portance to them. Can we not play the game of life with 
these counters as well as with those, in the institution of 
property as well as out of it? Let into it the new and re- 
newing principle of love, and property will be universality. 
No one gives the impression of superiority to the institution, 
which he must give who will reform it. It makes no dif- 
ference what you say, you must make me feel that you are 
aloof from it, by your natural and supernatural advantages, 
do easily see to the end of it — do see how man can do with- 
out it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves 
to be heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea, 
is against property, as we hold it. 

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor waste all 
my time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever 
I hear a false statement, I could never stay there five minutes. 
But why come out? The street is as false as the church, 
and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my 
speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we see 
an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special re- 
former, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, 
to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel 
amid the rags of a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst 
of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, 
alike in one place and in another — wherever, namely, a just 
and heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at 
hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth, 
it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which 
it stands, before the law of its own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the 



270 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

other defect was their reliance on Association. Doubts such 
as those I have intimated drove many good persons to agitate 
the questions of social reform. But the revolt against the 
spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the invet- 
erate abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals; 
and to do battle against numbers, they armed themselves with 
numbers, and against concert, they relied on new concert. 

Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, 
of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities have already 
been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans, and many 
more in the country at large. They aim to give every mem- 
ber a share in the manual labor, and to give an equal reward 
to labor and to talent; and to unite a liberal culture with 
an education to labor. The scheme offers, by the economies 
of associated labor and expense, to make every member rich, 
on the same amount of property that in separate families 
would leave every member poor. These new associations 
are composed of men and women of superior talents and 
sentiments, yet it may easily be questioned whether such 
a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able 
and the good; whether those who have energy will not pre- 
fer their chance of superiority and power in the world to the 
humble certainties of the Association; whether such a re- 
treat does not promise to become an asylum to those who 
have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong; 
and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions 
of men, because each finds that he cannot enter it without 
some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine 
things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, 
banded for some catholic object. Yes, excellent, but re- 
member that no society can ever be so large as one man. 
He, in his friendship, in his natural and momentary asso- 
ciations, doubles or multiplies himself, bur in the hour in 
which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he 
dwarfs himself below the stature of one. 

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and 
to such, concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have 
failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall 
not fail. Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but per- 
haps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 271 

differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could 
make the truth plain, but possibly a college or an ecclesias- 
tical council might. I have not been able either to persuade 
my brother, or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the 
potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence 
might effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes 
for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest 
in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on 
him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But con- 
cert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent 
than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make 
a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a 
blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there 
be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then 
is concert for the first time possible, because the force which 
moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished 
by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is 
the use of the concert of the false and the disunited ? There 
can be no concert in two where there is no concert in one. 
When the individual is not individual, but is dual, when his 
thoughts look one way and his actions another; when his 
faith is traversed by his habits, when his will, enlightened 
by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he 
rows, and with the other backs water, what concert can be ? 

I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The 
world is awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments 
show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men 
will live and communicate, and plow, and reap, and govern, 
as by added ethereal power, when once they are united, as 
in a celebrated experiment; by expiration and respiration 
exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the 
ground by the little finger only, and without sense of weight. 
But this union must be inward and not one of the covenants, 
and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use. 
The union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. 
It is the union of friends who live in different streets or 
towns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, 
is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion, 
and the stricter the union the smaller and the more pitiful 
he is. But leave him alone to recognize in every hour and 



272 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the 
works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all 
the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. 
Government will be adamantine without any governor. The 
union must be ideal in actual individualism. 

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith 
in man, which the heart is preaching in these days, and 
which engages more regard from the consideration that the 
speculations of one generation are the history of the next 
following. 

In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke 
of the deadness of its details. But it is open to graver criti- 
cism than the palsy of its members, it is a system of despair. 
The disease with which the human mind now labors is want 
of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We 
do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and 
we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe 
that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous 
people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a 
hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but of little 
faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as 
often as he went there, said to me " that he liked to have 
concerts, and fairs, and churches and other public amuse- 
ments go on." I am afraid the remark is too honest, and 
comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, 
"If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it 
amused." I notice, too, that the ground on which eminent 
public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: 
" This country is filling up with thousands and millions of 
voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our 
throats." We do not believe that any education, any system 
of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth 
of insight to a superficial mind. Having settled ourselves 
into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure allevia- 
tions, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual 
skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and 
comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of 
limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that 
society should be devoured by a secret melancholy, which 
breaks through all its smiles and all its gayety and games? 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 273 

But even one step further our infidelity has gone. It ap- 
pears that some doubt is felt by good and wise men whether 
really the happiness and probity of men is increased by the 
culture of the mind in those disciplines to which we give 
the name of education. Unhappily, too, the doubt comes 
from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. 
In their experience, the scholar was not raised by the sacred 
thoughts among which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. 
He was a profane person and became a showman, turning 
his gifts to a marketable use and not to his own sustenance 
and growth. It was found that the intellect could be in- 
dependently developed, that is, in separation from the man, 
as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was 
monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge was generated, 
which must still be fed, but was never satisfied, and this 
knowledge not being directed on action, never took the 
character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom 
it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, 
the power of speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but 
it did not bring him to peace, or to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is 
not strange that society should be disheartened and sen- 
sualized by unbelief. What remedy? Life must be lived 
on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, 
to which we are always invited to ascend, there the whole 
aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our 
education, and of our educated men. I do not believe that 
the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. 
I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the 
wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of conserva- 
tives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe 
in two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman 
who importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, 
which Philip refused; the woman exclaimed, "I appeal;" 
the king, astonished, asked to whom she appealed : the woman 
replied, " from Philip drunk to Philip sober." The text will 
suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but 
in man in two moods — in Philip drunk and Philip sober. 
I think, according to the good-hearted word of Plato, " Un- 
willingly the soul is deprived of truth." Iron conservative, 






274 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

miser, or thief, no man is, but by a supposed necessity, 
which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The 
soul lets no man go without some visitations and holy-days 
of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow 
scanning of a man's biography, that we are not so wedded to 
our paltry performances of every kind, but that every man has 
at intervals the grace to scorn his performances in comparing 
them with his belief of what he should do, that he puts him- 
self on the side of his enemies, listening gladly to what they 
say of him, and accusing himself of the same things. 

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which 
degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles 
poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, 
the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic 
minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the 
master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves 
of melody which the universe pours over his soul ! Before 
that gracious Infinite, out of which he drew these few strokes, 
how mean they look, though the praises of the world attend 
them. From the triumphs of his art, he turns with desire 
to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With 
silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that 
eclipses all which his hands have done, all which human 
hands have ever done. 

Well, we are all children of genius, the children of virtue, 
and feel their inspiration in our happier hours. Is not 
every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are 
conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they 
are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, 
or before taking their rest, when they are sick or aged, in 
the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience 
have been aroused; when they hear music or when they 
read poetry they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest 
tories that could be collected in England, Old or New, let 
a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart 
and mind act on them, and very quickly these frozen con- 
servators will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless 
will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these 
immovable statues will begin to spin and revolve. I can- 
not help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton relates 






NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 275 

of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave Eng- 
land with his plan of planting the gospel among the Amer- 
ican savages. " Lord Bathurst told me that the members 
of the Scriblerus Club being met at his house at dinner, they 
agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his 
scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the 
many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in 
his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing 
and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they 
were struck dumb, and after some pause, rose up all to- 
gether with earnestness, exclaiming : ' Let us set out with 
him immediately.' " Men in all ways are better than they 
seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the 
truth for their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps 
us from trusting them, and speaking to them rude truth. 
They resent your honesty for an instant, they will thank 
you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each 
other ? Is it to be pleased and flattered ? No, but to be con- 
victed and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of 
all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. 
We are weary of gliding ghost-like through the world, 
which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of 
reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so — 
by this manlike love of truth — those excesses and errors 
into which souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often 
fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming 
affluence of the world. They know the speed with which 
they come straight through the thin masquerade, and con- 
ceive a disgust at the indigence of nature : Rousseau, Mira- 
beau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron — and I could easily 
add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive their 
steeds so hard in the violence of living to forget its illusion: 
they would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. 
The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themis- 
tocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and 
fortune as a game to be well and skillfully played, but the 
stake not to be so valued, but that any time, it could be 
held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just be- 
fore the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian 
priest concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to 



276 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show 
him those mysterious sources. 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social rela- 
tions, in the preference, namely, which each man gives 
to the society of superiors over that of his equals. All that 
a man has will he give for right relations with his 
mates. All that he has will he give for an erect demeanor 
in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such 
things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, 
his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit 
himself in all men's sight as a man. The consideration 
of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of 
mark in his profession; naval and military honor, a gen- 
eral's commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the 
laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment 
of eminent merit, have this lustre for each candidate, that 
they enable him to walk erect and unshamed, in the presence 
of some persons, before whom he felt himself inferior. 
Having raised himself to this rank, having established his 
equality with class after class, of those with whom he would 
live well, he still finds certain others, before whom he 
cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer, 
somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage 
of him. Is his ambition pure? then will his laurels and his 
possessions seem worthless; instead of avoiding these men 
who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him, 
and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his hu- 
miliation and mortification, until he shall know why his 
eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are 
paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which 
gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution 
will not mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, 
high and unmatchable in the presence of any man, if the 
secret oracles whose whisper makes the sweetness and 
dignity of his life, do here withdraw and accompany him 
no longer, it is time to undervalue what he has valued, 
to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with 
Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleo- 
patra, and say : " All these will I relinquish, if you will 
show me the fountains of the Nile." Dear to us are those 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 277 

who love us — the swift moments we spend with them are 
the compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge 
our life; but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, 
for they add another life; they build a heaven before us, 
whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new 
powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new 
and unattempted performances. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior 
society, wishes to be convicted of his error, and to come 
to himself, so he wishes that the same healing should not 
stop in his thought, but should penetrate his will or active 
power. The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness 
than he from whom that selfishness withholds some im- 
portant benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to 
some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present 
fear the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, 
his custom may be broken up like fragments of ice, melted 
and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do 
you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish 
more to be a benefactor and servant than you wish to be 
served by me, and surely the greatest good fortune that 
could befall me is precisely to be so moved by you that I 
should say, " Take me and all mine, and use me and mine 
freely to your ends ! " for I could not say it, otherwise than 
because a great enlargement had come to my heart and 
mind, which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we 
are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our little properties, 
house and land, office and money, for the bread which they 
have in our experience yielded us, although we confess that 
our being does not flow through them. We desire to be 
made great, we desire to be touched with that fire which 
shall command this ice to stream, and make our existence 
a benefit. If, therefore, we start objections to your project, 
O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race, 
understand well, that it is because we wish to drive you to 
drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves 
confuted. We are haunted with a belief that you have a 
secret, which it would highliest advantage us to learn; 
we would force you to impart it to us, though it should 
bring us to prison, or to worse extremity. 

r hcv 



278 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man 
is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity 
in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of de- 
pravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no 
skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into 
common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It 
has had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each 
man's innocence and his real liking of his neighbor, have 
kept it a dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one 
day, and when the anger of the political contest gave a 
certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, 
and a good man at my side looking on the people, remarked, 
" I am satisfied that the largest part of these men on either 
side mean to vote right." I suppose considerate observers, 
looking at the masses of men in their blameless, and in their 
equivocal actions, will assent that in spite of selfishness 
and frivolity the general purpose in the great number of 
persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his 
assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, 
is in you; he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, 
because, though you think you have it, he feels that you 
have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details this general 
doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would 
be easy to adduce illustration in particulars of a man's 
equality to the church, of his equality to the state, and of 
his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men's 
memory, that a few years ago the liberal churches com- 
plained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name 
of Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a 
religious church would not complain. A religious man 
like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg, is not irritated by want- 
ing the sanction of the church, but the church feels the 
accusation of his presence and belief. 

It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets, 
to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a con- 
trivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken, 
and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power 
which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar experi- 
ment, called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 279 

column of water balances the ocean, is the symbol of the 
relation of one man to the whole family of men. The wise 
Dandini, on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and 
Diogenes read, "judged them to be great men every way, 
excepting that they were too much subjected to the rever- 
ence of the laws, which to second and authorize, true vir- 
tue must abate very much of its original vigor." 

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal to the 
state, so he is equal to every other man. The disparities 
of power in men are superficial ; and all frank and search- 
ing conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his 
brother, apprizes each of their radical unity. When two 
persons sit and converse in thoroughly good understanding, 
the remark is sure to be made, See how we have disputed 
about words ! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as 
every man knows among his friends, converse with the 
most commanding poetic genius, I think, it would appear 
that there was no inequality such as men fancy between 
them; that a perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like 
perceiving, abolished differences, and the poet would con- 
fess that his creative imagination gave him no deep advan- 
tage, but only the superficial one, that he could express 
himself, and the other could not; that his advantage was a 
knack, which might impose on indolent men, but could not 
impose on lovers of truth; for they know the tax of talent, 
or, what a price of greatness the power of expression too 
often pays. I believe it is the conviction of the purest men 
that the net amount of man does not much vary. Each is 
incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. 
His want of skill in other directions has added to his fitness 
for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation 
yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hinderance oper- 
ates as a concentration of his force. 

These and the like experiences intimate that man stands 
in strict connection with a higher fact never yet mani- 
fested. There is power over and behind us, and we are the 
channels of its communications. We seek to say thus and so, 
and over our head some spirit sits, which contradicts what 
we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; an- 
other self within our eyes dissuades him. That which we 



280 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and 
our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the 
enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. 
We exclaim, "There's a traitor in the house ! " but at last 
it appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This 
open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, 
so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have 
never expressed the truth, and although I have never heard 
the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole 
truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your ques- 
tions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to 
the question, What is the operation we call Providence? 
There lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every 
time we converse, we seek to translate it into speech, but 
whether we hit or whether we miss we have the fact. Every 
discourse is an approximate answer; but it is of small con- 
sequence that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, while 
it abides for contemplation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make them- 
selves good in time^ the man who shall be born, whose advent 
men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall en- 
joy his connection with a higher life, with the man within 
man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native 
but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and 
blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful, which 
works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails 
itself of our success, when we obey it, and of our ruin, when 
we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else 
the word justice would have no meaning: they believe that 
the best is the true ; that right is done at last ; or chaos would 
come. It rewards actions after their nature and not after 
the design of the agent. " Work," it saith to man, " in every 
hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst 
not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, 
planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be honest work, 
done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to 
these senses as well as to the thought : no matter, how often 
defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing 
well done, is to have done it." 

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and 

V 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 281 

to see how this high will prevails without an exception or 
an interval, he settles himself into serenity. He can al- 
ready rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will fall 
where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries us 
securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned; 
we need not interfere to help it on, and he will learn, one 
day, the mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all 
our task, and we need not assist the administration of the 
universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town right con- 
cerning the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation 
of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder to set 
the town right concerning themselves, and will certainly 
succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the in- 
sufficiency of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he 
will have demonstrated his insufficiency to all men's eyes. 
In like manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and 
he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only liberating 
influence. We wish to escape from subjection, and a sense 
of inferiority — and we make self-denying ordinances, we 
drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to 
jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to. his genius; only 
by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does 
an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead him by the hand 
out of all the wards of the prison. 

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as 
we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to 
realize our aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, 
which, when it is valiantly conducted, will yield the im- 
agination a higher joy than any fiction. All around us, what 
powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, 
and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neu- 
rologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does 
not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should 
see with them; and that is ever the difference between the 
wise and the unwise ; the latter wonders at what is unusual, 
the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart 
which has received so much, trust the Power by which it 
lives ? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul 
that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure 
that the future will be worthy of the past? 



WORSHIP 

(i860) 

This is he, who felled by foes, 

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows : 

He to captivity was sold, 

But him no prison-bars would hold : 

Though they sealed him in a rock, 

Mountain chains he can unlock : 

Thrown to lions for their meat, 

The crouching lion kissed his feet : 

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled, 

But arched o'er him an honoring vault. 

This is he men miscall Fate, 

Threading dark ways, arriving late, 

But ever coming in time to crown 

The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down. 

He is the oldest, and best known, 

More near than aught thou call'st thy own, 

Yet, greeted in another's eyes, 

Disconcerts with glad surprise. 

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers, 

Floods with blessings unawares. 

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line, 

Severing rightly his from thine, 

Which is human, which divine. 

SOME of my friends have complained, when the pre- 
ceding papers were read, that we discussed Fate, 
Power, and Wealth, on too low a platform; gave too 
much line to the evil spirit of the times; too many cakes to 
Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth's risk of making, by excess 
of candor, the argument of atheism so strong, that he could 
not answer it. I have no fears of being forced in my own 
despite to play, as we say, the devil's attorney. I have no 
infirmity of faith; no belief that it is of much importance 
what I or any man may say: I am sure that a certain truth 
will be said through me, though I should be dumb, or though 

283 



284 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

I should try to say the reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for 
any good soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his 
skepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am 
not afraid of falling into my inkpot. I have no sympathy 
with a poor man I knew, who, when suicides abounded, told 
me he dared not look at his razor. We are of different 
opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be 
at heart on the side of truth. 

I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs. 
If the Divine Providence has hid from men neither disease, 
nor deformity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out 
in passions, in war, in trade, in the love of power and pleas- 
ure, in hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures, and arts, — 
let us not be so nice that we cannot write these facts down 
coarsely as they stand, or doubt but there is a counter- 
statement as ponderous, which we can arrive at, and which, 
being put, will make all square. The solar system has no 
anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and 
honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias 
can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical 
power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down- 
weigh. The strength of that principle is not measured in 
ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature. 
We may well give skepticism as much line as we can. The 
spirit will return, and fill us. It drives the drivers. It 
counterbalances any accumulations of power. 

" Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow." 

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made of hooks 
and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-plaster, and whether your 
community is made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints 
or of wreckers, it coheres in a perfect ball. Men as naturally 
make a state, or a church, as caterpillars a web. If they 
were more refined, it would be less formal, it would be 
nervous, like that of the shakers, who, from long habit of 
thinking and feeling together, it is said, are affected in the 
same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and as 
they go with perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or 
shop, so are they inclined for a ride or a journey at the 



WORSHIP 285 

same instant, and the horses come up with the family car- 
riage unbespoken to the door. 

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree 
bears apples. A self-poise belongs to every particle; and a 
rectitude to every mind, and is the Nemesis and protector of 
every society. I and my neighbors have been bred in the 
notion, that, unless we came soon to some good church, — 
Calvinism, or Behmenism, or Romanism, or Mormonism, — 
there would be a universal thaw and dissolution. No Isaiah 
or Jeremy has arrived. Nothing can exceed the anarchy that 
has followed in our skies. The stern old faiths have all 
pulverized. 'Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies 
out in search of religions. 'Tis as flat anarchy in our ec- 
clesiastic realms, as that which existed in Massachusetts, in 
the Revolution, or which prevails now on the slope of the 
Rocky Mountains or Pike's Peak. Yet we may shift to live. 
Men are loyal. Nature has self-poise in all her works; 
certain proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and, 
not less a harmony in faculties, a fitness in the spring and 
the regulator. 

The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, or 
Wesley, or Channing, need give us no uneasiness. The builder 
of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature as that the 
religion, that is, the public nature, should fall out : the public 
and the private element, like north and south, like inside 
and outside, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every 
soul, and cannot be subdued, except the soul is dissipated. 
God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches 
and religions. 

In the last chapters, we treated some particulars of the 
question of culture. But the whole state of man is a state 
of culture ; and its flowering and completion may be described 
as Religion, or Worship. There is always some religion, 
some hope and fear extended into the invisible, — from the 
blind boding which nails a horseshoe to the mast or the 
threshold, up to the song of the Elders in the Apocalypse. 
But the religion cannot rise above the state of the votary. 
Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of 
the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, 
and of the merchants a merchant. In all ages, souls out of 



286 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

time, extraordinary, prophetic, are born, who are rather re- 
lated to the system of the world, than to their particular age 
and locality. These announce absolute truths, which, with 
whatever reverence received, are speedily dragged down into 
a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of our Indians, 
and some of the Pacific islanders, flog their gods, wrjen 
things take an unfavorable turn. The Greek poets did not 
hesitate to let lose their petulant wit on their deities also. 
Laomedon, in his anger at Neptune and Apollo, who had 
built Troy for him, and demanded their price, does not hesi- 
tate to menace them that he will cut their ears off. 1 Among 
our Norse forefathers, King Olaf's mode of converting # 
Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals 
on his belly, which burst asunder. " Wilt thou now, Eyvind, 
believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another 
argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant 
disciple Rand, who refused to believe. 

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European cul- 
ture, — the grafted or meliorated tree in a crab forest. And 
to marry a pagan wife or husband, was to marry Beast, and 
voluntarily to take a step backwards towards the baboon. 

" Hengist had verament 
A daughter both fair and gent, 
But she was heathen Sarazine, 
And Vortigern for love fine 
Her took to fere and to wife, 
And was cursed in all his life ; 
For he let Christian wed heathen, 
And mixed our blood as flesh and mathen." 2 

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the 
pagan sources, Richard of Devizes's chronicle of Richard 
I.'s crusade, in the twelfth century, may show. King Richard 
taunts God with forsaking him : " O fie ! O how unwilling , 
should I be to forsake thee, in so forlorn and dreadful a j 
position, were I thy lord and advocate, as thou art mine. In 
sooth, my standards will in future be despised, not through ' 
my fault, but through thine : in sooth, not through any cow- [ 
ardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God j. 
conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal." The re- 

l Iliad. Book xxi, 1. 455. 2 Moths or worms. 



WORSHIP 287 

ligion of the early English poets is anomalous, so devout and 
so blasphemous, in the same breath. Such is Chaucer's 
extraordinary confusion of heaven and earth in the picture of 
Dido. 

" She was so fair, 
So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad, 
That if that God that heaven and earthe made 
Would have a love for beauty and goodness, 
And womanhede, truth, and seemliness, 
Whom should he loven but this lady sweet? 
There n' is no woman to him half so meet." 

With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own 
taste and decorum. We think and speak with more temper- 
ance and gradation, — but is not indifferentism as bad as 
superstition ? 

We live in a transition period, when the old faiths which 
comforted nations, and not only so, but made nations, seem 
to have spent their force. I do not find the religions of men 
at this moment very creditable to them, but either childish 
and insignificant, or unmanly and effeminating. The fatal 
trait is the divorce between religion and morality. Here are 
know-nothing religions, or churches that proscribe intellect; 
scortatory religions; slave-holding and slave-trading re- 
ligions; and, even in the decent populations, idolatries 
wherein the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet indulgence. 
The lover of the old religion complains that our contem- 
poraries, scholars as well as merchants, succumb to a great 
despair, — have corrupted into a timorous conservatism, and 
believe in nothing. In our large cities, the population is god- 
less, materialized, — no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusi- 
asm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and 
appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on, — 
so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are 
gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them 
together, and not any worthy purpose. There is no faith in 
the intellectual, none in the moral universe. There is faith 
in chemistry, in meat, and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the 
steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine-wheels, sewing ma- 
chines, and in public opinion, but not in divine causes. A silent 
revolution has loosed the tension of the old religious sects, 



288 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

and, in place of the gravity and permanence of those so- 
cieties of opinion, they run into freak and extravagance. In 
creeds never was such levity; witness the heathenisms in 
Christianity, the periodic " revivals," the Millennium mathe- 
matics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, 
the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the 
deliration of rappings, the rat and mouse revelation, thumps 
in table-drawers, and black art. The architecture, the music, 
the prayer, partake of the madness: the arts sink into shift 
and make-believe. Not knowing what to do, we ape our 
ancestors ; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries 
of the dark ages. By the irresistible maturing of the general 
mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold. The 
dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he 
standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis impossible to 
maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, 
as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws. 
From this change, and in the momentary absence of any re- 
ligious genius that could offset the immense material activity, 
there is a feeling that religion is gone. When Paul Leroux 
offered his article " Dieu " to the conductor of a leading 
French journal, he replied, "La question de Dieu manque 
d'actualite." 

In Italy, Mr. Gladstone said of the late King of Naples, 
" it has been a proverb, that he has erected the negation 
of God into a system of government." In this country, 
the like stupefaction was in the air, and the phrase 
" higher law " became a political jibe. What proof of infi- 
delity, like the toleration and propagandism of slavery? 
What, like the direction of education? What, like the fa- 
cility of conversion? What, like the externality of churches 
that once sucked the roots of right and wrong, and now have 
perished away till they are a speck of whitewash on the 
wall? What proof of skepticism like the base rate at which 
the highest mental and moral gifts are held? Let a man 
attain the highest and broadest culture that any American 
has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad col- 
lision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that 
the best thing has happened to him ; that, after the education 
has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the 






WORSHIP 289 

best use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him to save his 
board. 

Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in human 
virtue. It is believed by well-dressed proprietors that there 
is no more virtue than they possess ; that the solid portion of 
society exist for the arts of comfort : that life is an affair to 
put somewhat between the upper and lower mandibles. How 
prompt the suggestion of a low motive ! Certain patriots in 
England devoted themselves for years to creating a public 
opinion that should break down the corn-laws and establish 
free trade. " Well," says the man in the street, " Cobden got 
a stipend out of it." Kossuth fled hither across the ocean 
to try if he could rouse the New World to a sympathy with 
European liberty. " Aye," says New York, " he made a 
handsome thing of it, enough to make him comfortable for 
life." 

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and well- 
conditioned class. If a pickpocket intrude into the society of 
gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have, and he 
finds himself uncomfortable, and glad to get away. But if 
an adventurer go through all the forms, procure himself to 
be elected to a post of trust, as of senator, or president, — 
though by the same arts as we detest in the house-thief, — the 
same gentlemen who agree to discountenance the private 
rogue, will be forward to show civilities and marks of re- 
spect to the public one : and no amount of evidence of his 
crimes will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary 
dinners, opening their own houses to him, and priding them- 
selves on his acquaintance. We were not deceived by the 
professions of the private adventurer, — the louder he talked 
of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons ; but we ap- 
peal to the sanctified preamble of the messages and procla- 
mations of the public sinner, as the proof of sincerity. It 
must be that they who pay this homage have said to them- 
selves, On the whole, we don't know about this that you call 
honesty; a bird in the hand is better. 

Even well-disposed, good sort of people are touched with 
the same infidelity, and for brave, straightforward action, 
use half-measures and compromises. Forgetful that a little 
measure is a great error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses 



290 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

a sharp tool, they go on choosing the dead men of routine. 
But the official men can in nowise help you in any question 
of to-day, they deriving entirely from the old dead things. 
Only those can help in counsel or conduct who did not make 
a party pledge to defend this or that, but who were appointed 
by God Almighty, before they came into the world, to stand 
for this which they uphold. 

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading 
men is a vice general throughout American society. But the 
multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence 
of health. In spite of our imbecility and terrors, and " uni- 
versal decay of religion," &c. &c, the moral sense reappears 
to-day with the same morning newness that has been from 
of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say, there is 
no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, there is 
no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of his 
superlative effects. The religion of the cultivated class now, 
to be sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements 
which it was once their religion to assume. But this avoid- 
ance will yield spontaneous forms in their due hour. There 
is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech 
aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, unde- 
scribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in 
us, our rightful lord : we are not to do, but to let do ; not to 
work, but to be worked upon ; and to this homage there is 
a consent of all thoughtful and just men in all ages and con- 
ditions. To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlarge- 
ments of power. 'Tis remarkable that our faith in ecstasy 
consists with total inexperience of it. It is the order of the 
world to educate with accuracy the senses and the under- 
standing; and the enginery at work to draw out these pow- 
ers in priority, no doubt, has its office. But we are never 
without a hint that these powers are mediate and servile, and 
that we are one day to deal with real being, — essences with 
essences. Even the fury of material activity has some re- 
sults friendly to moral health. The energetic action of the 
times develops individualism, and the religious appear iso- 
lated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven 
deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not 
saved in bundles. The Spirit saith to the man, ' How is it 



WORSHIP 291 

with thee? thee personally? is it well? is it ill? For_a 
great nature^ it is a happiness to escape a religious training, 
—religion of character is so apt to be invaded. Religion 
must always be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep 
its wild beauty. " I have seen," said a traveller who had 
known the extremes of society, " I have seen human nature 
in all its forms, it is everywhere the same, but the wilder it 
is, the more virtuous." 

We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepti- 
cism devastates the community. I do> not think it can be 
cured or stayed by any modification of theologic creeds, much 
less by theologic discipline. The cure for false theology is 
motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your 
moral perceptions at this hour. That which is signified by 
the words " moral " and " spiritual," is a lasting essence, and, 
with whatever illusions we have loaded them, will certainly 
bring back the words, age after age, to their ancient mean- 
ing. I know no words that mean so much. In our defini- 
tions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. 
The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes 
itself, which works without means, and which cannot be con- 
ceived as not existing. Men .talk of "mere morality," — which 
is much as if one should say, " poor God, with nobody to help 
him." I find the omnipresence and the almightiness in the 
reaction of every atom in Nature. I can best indicate by 
examples those reactions by which every part of Nature re- 
plies to the purpose of the actor, — beneficently to the good, 
penally to the bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, 
and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be 
they seen or unseen, pervade and govern. 

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat 
him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do 
not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed 
his market-cart into a chariot of the sun. What a day dawns, 
when we have taken to heart the doctrine of faith ! to prefer, 
as a better investment, being to doing; being to seeming; 
logic to rhythm and to display ; the year to the day ; the life 
to the year; character to performance; — and have come to 
know, that justice will be done us; and, if our genius is slow, 
the term will be long. 



292 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

'Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding rela- 
tion to the health of man, and to his highest powers, so as to 
be, in some manner, the source of intellect. All the great 
ages have been ages of belief. I mean, when there was any- 
extraordinary power of performance, when great national 
movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes existed, 
when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest, and 
had fixed its thoughts on spiritual verities, with as strict a 
grasp as that of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or the 
trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of the moun- 
tains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men 
covet, are somehow born out of that Alpine district ; that any- 
extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a 
moral charm. Thus, I think, we very slowly admit in an- 
other man a higher degree of moral sentiment than our own, 
— a finer conscience, more impressionable, or, which marks 
minuter degrees; an ear to hear acuter notes of right and 
wrong, than we can. I think we listen suspiciously, and very 
slowly to any evidence to that point. But, once satisfied of 
such superiority, we set no limit to our expectation of his 
genius. For such persons are nearer to the secret of God 
than others ; are bathed by sweeter waters ; they hear notices, 
they see visions, where others are vacant. We believe that 
holiness confers a certain insight, because not by our private, 
but by our public force, can we share and know the nature 
of things. 

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and mor- 
als. Given the equality of two intellects, — which will form 
the most reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted? 
" The heart has its arguments, with which the understanding 
is not acquainted." For the heart is at once aware of the 
state of health or disease, which is the controlling state, that 
is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of course, to all question of 
the ingenuity of arguments, the amount of facts, or the 
elegance of rhetoric. So intimate is this alliance of mind and 
heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character. The bias 
of errors of principle carries away men into perilous courses, 
as soon as their will does not control their passion or talent. 
Hence the extraordinary blunders, and final wrong head, into 
which men spoiled by ambition usually fall. Hence the 






WORSHIP 293 

remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of 
crime, is love. " As much love, so much mind," said the Latin 
proverb. The superiority that has no superior; the re- 
deemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal essence, 
is love. 

The moral must be the measure of health. If your eye 
is on the eternal, your intellect will grow, and your opinions 
and actions will have a beauty which no learning or com- 
bined advantages of other men can rival. The moment of 
your loss of faith, and acceptance of the lucrative standard, 
will be marked in the pause, or solstice of genius, the se- 
quent retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attraction to 
other minds. The vulgar are sensible of the change in you, 
and of your descent, though they clap you on the back, and 
congratulate you on your increased common sense. 

Our recent culture has been in natural science. We have 
learned the manners of the sun and of the moon, of the 
rivers and the rains, of the mineral and elemental king- 
doms, of plants and animals. Man has learned to weigh the 
sun, and its weight neither loses nor gains. The path of a 
star, the moment of an eclipse, can be determined to the frac- 
tion of a second. Well, to him the book of history, the book 
of love, the lures of passion, and the commandments of duty 
are opened: and the next lesson taught, is, the continuation 
of the inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of 
will, and of thought; that, if, in sidereal ages, gravity and 
projection keep their craft, and the ball never loses its way 
in its wild path through space, — a secreter gravitation, a 
secreter projection, rule not less tyrannically in human his- 
tory, and keep the balance of power from age to age un- 
broken. For, though the new element of freedom and an 
individual has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are 
prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, are in search 
of justice, and ultimate right is done. Religion or worship 
is the attitude of those who see this unity, intimacy, and 
sincerity; who see that, against all appearances, the nature 
of things works for truth and right forever. 

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of 
gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws 
do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push- the same 

s hc v 



294 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social 
and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy's game, 
or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judg- 
ment keeps watch and ward. And this appears in a class 
of facts which concerns all men, within and above their 
creeds. 

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It 
was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, 
or, it was so then, and another day it would have been other- 
wise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was 
born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him 
and of this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there 
was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arith- 
metic, or an experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight 
of the moth is preordained, and all things go by number, rule, 
and weight. 

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does 
not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks : as he deals, so he is, 
and so he appears; he does not see, that his son is the son 
of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not 
exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not 
somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no 
miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, — but method, and an 
even web; and what comes out, that was put in. As we are, 
so we do ; and as we do, so is it done to us ; we are the build- 
ers of our fortunes ; cant and lying and the attempt to secure 
a good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked 
and vain. But, in the human mind, this tie of fate is made 
alive. The law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is 
inspiration; out there in Nature, we see its fatal strength. 
We call it the moral sentiment. 

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, 
which compares well with any in our Western books. " Law 
it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet; 
which is smallest of the least, and largest of the large; all, 
and knowing all things ; which hears without ears, sees with- 
out eyes, moves without feet, and seizes without hands." 

If any reader tax me with using vague and traditional 
phrases, let me suggest to him, by a few examples, what kind 
of a trust this is, and how real. Let me show him that the 



WORSHIP 295 

dice are loaded; that the colors are fast, because they are 
the native colors of the fleece; that the globe is a battery, 
because every atom is a magnet; and that the police and sin- 
cerity of the Universe are secured by God's delegating his 
divinity to every particle ; that there is no room for hypocrisy, 
no margin for choice. 

The countryman leaving his native village, for the first 
time, and going abroad, finds all his habits broken up. In a 
new nation and language, his sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, 
is lost. What ! it is not then necessary to the order and 
existence of society ? He misses this, and the commanding eye 
of his neighborhood, which held him to decorum. This is 
the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of London, of Paris, 
to young men. But after a little experience, he makes the 
discovery that there are no large cities, — none large enough 
to hide in ; that the censors of action are as numerous and as 
near in Paris, as in Littleton or Portland ; that the gossip is 
as prompt and vengeful. There is no concealment, and, for 
each offence, a several vengeance ; that, reaction, or nothing 
for nothing, or, things are as broad as they are long, is not a 
rule for Littleton or Portland, but for the Universe. 

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. We are 
disgusted by gossip ; yet it is of importance to keep the angels 
in their proprieties. The smallest fly will draw blood, and 
gossip is a weapon impossible to exclude from the privatest, 
highest, selectest. Nature created a police of many ranks. 
God has delegated himself to a million deputies. From these 
low external penalties, the scale ascends. Next come the re- 
sentments, the fears, which injustice calls out; then, the false 
relations in which the offender is put to other men ; and the 
reaction of his fault on himself, in the solitude and devasta- 
tion of his mind. 

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flag- 
ging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize 
itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture 
or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had, 
when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or 
gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. 
We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and 
things themselves are detective. If you follow the suburban 



296 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a little 
money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house. 
There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret 
can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball, 
where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by 
hiding. If a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those 
whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, and usually 
know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if there be some be- 
lief or some purpose he would bury in his breast? 'Tis as 
hard to hide as fire. He is a strong man who can hold down 
his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences, 
without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he 
stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom 
of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and 
imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People 
seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a con- 
fession of character. We can only see what we are, and if 
we misbehave we suspect others. The fame of Shakspeare 
or of Voltaire, of Thomas a Kempis, or of Bonaparte, char- 
acterizes those who give it. As gas-light is found to be the 
best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by piti- 
less publicity. 

Each must be armed — not necessarily with musket and 
pike. Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel that he has better 
muskets and pikes in his energy and constancy. To every 
creature is his own weapon, however skilfully concealed from 
himself, a good while. His work is sword and shield. Let him 
accuse none, let him injure none. The way to mend the bad 
world, is to create the right world. Here is a low political 
economy plotting to cut the throat of foreign competition, 
and establish our own; — excluding others by force, or mak- 
ing war on them ; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to 
worse wares of ours. But the real and lasting victories are 
those of peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the 
foreign artisan, is, not to kill him, but to beat his work. And 
the Crystal Palaces and the World Fairs, with their commit- 
tees and prizes on all kinds of industry, are the result of this 
feeling. The American workman who strikes ten blows with 
his hammer, whilst the foreign workman only strikes one, 
is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the blows were 



WORSHIP 297 

aimed at and told on his person. I look on that man as 
happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his 
work for a reply, not into the market, not into opinion, not 
into patronage. In every variety of human employment, in 
the mechanical and in the fine arts, in navigation, in farming, 
in legislating, there are among the numbers who do their 
task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, and as badly 
as they dare, — there are the working-men on whom the 
burden of the business falls, — those who love work, and love 
to see it rightly done, who finish their task for its own sake ; 
and the state and the world is happy, that has the most of 
such finishers. The world will always do justice at last to 
such finishers : it cannot otherwise. He who has acquired the 
ability, may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and 
appreciated, and know that it will not loiter. Men talk as if 
victory were something fortunate. Work is victory. Wher- 
ever work is done, victory is obtained. There is no chance, 
and no blanks. You want but one verdict: if you have your 
own, you are secure of the rest. And yet, if witnesses are 
wanted, witnesses are near. There was never a man born 
so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the 
world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. 
I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone, and no 
man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with 
him into life, — now under one disguise, now under another, — 
like a police in citizens' clothes, walk with him, step for step, 
through all the kingdom of time. 

This reaction, this sincerity is the property of all things. 
To make our word or act sublime, we must make it real. It 
is our system that counts, not the single word or unsupported 
action. Use what language you will, you can never say 
anything but what you are. What I am, and what I think, 
is conveyed to you, in spite of my efforts to hold it back. 
What I am has been secretly conveyed from me to another, 
whilst I was vainly making up my mind to tell him it. He 
has heard from me what I never spoke. 

As men get. on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, 
and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the 
progress of the character, there is an increasing faith in the 
moral sentiment and a decreasing faith in propositions. 



298 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Young people admire talents, and particular excellences. As 
we grow older, we value total powers and effects, as the spirit, 
or quality of the man. We have another sight, and a new 
standard; an insight which disregards what is done for the 
eye, and pierces to the doer; an ear which hears not what 
men say, but hears what they do not say. 

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in the Catholic 
Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom many anecdotes touching 
his discernment and benevolence are told at Naples and 
Rome. Among the nuns in a convent not far from Rome, 
one had appeared, who laid claim to certain rare gifts of in- 
spiration and prophecy, and the abbess advised the Holy 
Father, at Rome, of the wonderful powers shown by her 
novice. The Pope did not well know what to make of these 
new claims, and Philip coming in from a journey, one day, 
he consulted him. Philip undertook to visit the nun, and as- 
certain her character. He threw himself on his mule, all travel- 
soiled as he was, and hastened through the mud and mire to 
the distant convent. He told the abbess the wishes of his 
Holiness, and begged her to summon the nun without delay. 
The nun was sent for, and, as soon as she came into the 
apartment, Philip stretched out his leg all bespattered with 
mud, and desired her to draw off his boots. The young 
nun, who had become the object of much attention and re- 
spect, drew back with anger, and refused the office: Philip 
ran out of doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly 
to the Pope; " Give yourself no uneasiness, Holy Father, any 
longer : here is no miracle, for here is no humility." 

We need not much mind what people please to say, but 
what they must say; what their natures say, though their 
busy, artful Yankee understandings try to hold back, and 
choke that word, and to articulate something different. If 
we will sit quietly, — what they ought to say is said, with their 
will, or against their will. We do not care for you, let us 
pretend what we will: — we are always looking through 
you to the dim dictator behind you. Whilst your habit or 
whim chatters, we civilly and impatiently wait until that wise 
superior shall speak again. Even children are not deceived 
by the false reasons which their parents give in answer to 
their questions, whether touching natural facts, or religion, 



WORSHIP 299 

or persons. When the parent, instead of thinking how it 
really is, puts them off with a traditional or a hypocritical 
answer, the children perceive that it is traditional or hypo- 
critical. To a sound constitution the defect of another is 
at once manifest: and the marks of it are only concealed 
from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical observer 
remarks, that the sympathies of the chest, abdomen, and 
pelvis, tell at last on the face, and on all its features. Not 
only does our beauty waste, but it leaves word how it went 
to waste. Physiognomy and phrenology are not new sci- 
ences, but declarations of the soul that it is aware of certain 
new sources of information. And now sciences of broader 
scope are starting up behind these. And so for ourselves, it 
is really of little importance what blunders in statement we 
make, so only we make no wilful departures from the truth. 
How a man's truth comes to mind, long after we have for- 
gotten all his words ! How it comes to us in silent hours, 
that truth is our only armor in all passages of life and 
death ! Wit is cheap, and anger is cheap ; but if you cannot 
argue or explain yourself to the other party, cleave to the 
truth against me, against thee, and you gain a station from 
which you cannot be dislodged. The other party will forget 
the words that you spoke, but the part you took continues 
to plead for you. 

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers 
me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings 
me so many problems, will bring the answers also in due 
time. Very rich, very potent, very cheerful Giver that he 
is, he shall have it all his own way, for me. Why should 
I give up my thought, because I cannot answer an objection 
to it? Consider only, whether it remains in my life the 
same it was. That only which we have within, can we see 
without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. 
Tf there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters 
and sweeps. He only is rightly immortal, to whom all 
things are immortal. I have read somewhere, that none 
is accomplished, so long as any are incomplete; that the 
happiness of one cannot consist with the misery of any 
other. 

The Buddhists say, " No seed will die ;" every seed will 



300 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

grow. Where is the service which can escape its remuner- 
ation? What is vulgar, and the essence of all vulgarity, 
but the avarice of reward ? Tis the difference of artisan and 
artist, of talent and genius, of sinner and saint. The man 
whose eyes are nailed not on the nature of his act, but 
on the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame, — 
is almost equally low. He is great, whose eyes are opened 
to see that the reward of actions cannot be escaped, because 
he is transformed into his action, and taketh its nature, 
which bears its own fruit, like every other tree. A great 
man cannot be hindered of the effect of his act, because it is 
immediate. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and 
in the dark brings them friends from far. Fear God, and 
where you go, men shall think they walk in hallowed 
cathedrals. 

And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory 
of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the 
intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and that, as soon as the 
man is right, assurances and provisions emanate from the 
interior of his body and his mind; as, when flowers reach 
their ripeness, incense exhales from them, and as a beautiful 
atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged em- 
anations from all its rocks and soils. 

Thus man is made equal to every event. He can face 
danger for the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can 
run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide. 
He feels the insurance of a just employment. I am not 
afraid of accident, as long as I am in my place. It is strange 
that superior persons should not feel that they have some 
better resistance against cholera, than avoiding green peas 
and salads. Life is hardly respectable, — is it? if it has no 
generous, guaranteeing task, no duties or affections, that con- 
stitute a necessity of existing. Every man's task is his life- 
preserver. The conviction that his work is dear to God and 
cannot be spared, defends him. The lightning-rod that dis- 
arms the cloud of its threat is his body in its duty. A high 
aim reacts on the means, on the days, on the organs of the 
body. A high aim is curative, as well as arnica. " Napo- 
leon," says Goethe, " visited those sick of the plague, in 
order to prove that the man who could banish fear, could 



WORSHIP 301 

vanquish the plague also; and he was right. 'Tis incredible 
what force the will has in such cases : it penetrates the body, 
and puts it in a state of activity, which repels all hurtful 
influences; whilst fear invites them." 

It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst he was 
besieging a town on the continent, a gentleman sent to him 
on public business came to his camp, and learning that the 
King was before the walls, he ventured to go where he was. 
He found him directing the operation of his gunners, and, 
having explained his errand, and received his answer, the 
King said, " Do you not know, sir, that every moment you 
spend here is at the risk of your life?" " I run no more risk," 
replied the gentleman, "than your Majesty." "Yes," said 
the King, " but my duty brings me here, and yours does not." 
In a few minutes, a cannon-ball fell on the spot, and the 
gentleman was killed. 

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of 
his early instinct, under the guidance of a deeper instinct. 
He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the 
prosperity of the great. He learns the greatness of humility. 
He shall work in the dark, work against failure, pain, and 
ill-will. If he is insulted, he can be insulted; all his affair 
is not to insult. Hafiz writes, 

" At the last day, men shall wear 
On their heads the dust, 
As ensign and as ornament 
Of their lowly trust." 

The moral equalizes all ; enriches, empowers all. It is the 
coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. 
Under the whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality 
with saints and heroes. In the greatest destitution and 
calamity, it surprises man with a feeling of elasticity which 
makes nothing of loss. 

I recall some' traits of a remarkable person whose life 
and discourse betrayed many inspirations of this sentiment. 
Benedict was always great in the present time. He had 
hoarded nothing from the past, neither in his cabinets, neither 
in his memory. He had no designs on the future, neither 
for what he should do to men, nor for what men should 
do for him. He said, " I am never beaten until I know that 



302 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

I am beaten. I meet powerful brutal people to whom I have 
no skill to reply. They think they have defeated me. It is 
so published in society, in the journals: I am defeated in 
this fashion, in all men's sight, perhaps on a dozen different 
lines. My ledger may show that I am in debt, cannot yet 
make my ends meet, and vanquish the enemy so. My race 
may not be prospering : we are sick, ugly, obscure, unpopular. 
My children may be worsted. I seem to fail in my friends 
and clients, too. That is to say, in all the encounters that 
have yet chanced, I have not been weaponed for that par- 
ticular occasion, and have been historically beaten; and yet, 
I know, all the time, that I have never been beaten; have 
never yet fought, shall certainly fight, when my hour comes, 
and shall beat." " A man," says the Vishnu Sarma, " who 
having well compared his own strength or weakness with 
that of others, after all doth not know the difference, is 
easily overcome by his enemies." 

" I spent," he said, " ten months in the country. Thick- 
starred Orion was my only companion. Wherever a squirrel 
or a bee can go with security, I can go. I ate whatever was 
set before me, I touched ivy and dogwood. When I went 
abroad, I kept company with every man on the road, for I 
knew that my evil and my good did not come from these, but 
from the Spirit, whose servant I was. For I could not stoop 
to be a circumstance, as they did, who put their life into 
their fortune and their company. I would not degrade my- 
self by casting about in my memory for a thought, nor by 
waiting for one. If the thought come, I would give it en- 
tertainment. It should, as it ought, go into my hands and 
feet; but if it come not spontaneously, it comes not rightly 
at all. If it can spare me, I am sure I can spare it. It shall 
be the same with my friends. I will never woo the loveliest. 
I will not ask any friendship or favor. When I come to my 
own, we shall both know it. Nothing will be to be asked 
or to be granted." Benedict went out to seek his friend, and 
met him on the way; but he expressed no surprise at any 
coincidences. On the other hand, if he called at the door of 
his friend, and he was not at home, he did not go again; 
concluding that he had misinterpreted the intimations. 

He had the whim not to make an apology to the same 






WORSHIP 303 

individual whom he had wronged. For this, he said, was a 
piece of personal vanity ; but he would correct his conduct in 
that respect in which he had faulted, to the next person he 
should meet. Thus, he said, universal justice was satisfied. 

Mira came to ask what she should do with the poor Gene- 
see woman who had hired herself to work for her, at a 
shilling a day, and, now sickening, was like to be bedridden 
on her hands. Should she keep her, or should she dismiss 
her? But Benedict said, "Why ask? One thing will clear 
itself as the thing to be done, and not another, when the hour 
comes. Is it a question, whether to put her into the street? 
Just as much whether to thrust the little Jenny on your arm 
into the street. The milk and meal you give the beggar, 
will fatten Jenny. Thrust the woman out, and you thrust 
your babe out of doors, whether it so seem to you or 
not." 

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, in the 
doctrine which they faithfully hold, that encourages them to 
open their doors to every wayfaring man who proposes to 
come among them; for, they say, the Spirit will presently 
manifest to the man himself, and to the society, what manner 
of person he is, and whether he belongs among them. They 
do not receive him, they do not reject him. And not in vain 
have they worn their clay coat, and drudged in their fields, 
and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, if they 
have truly learned thus much wisdom. 

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by 
sympathy with the invisible and real, finds support in labor, 
instead of praise; who does not shine, and would rather not. 
With eyes open, he makes the choice of virtue, which out- 
rages the virtuous; of religion, which churches stop their 
discords to burn and exterminate; for the highest virtue is 
always against the law. 

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. 
Talent and success interest me but moderately. The great 
class, they who affect our imagination, the men who could 
not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, 
the lost, the fools of ideas, — they suggest what they cannot 
execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar. 
The Spirit does not love cripples and malformations. If 



304 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

there ever was a good man, be certain, there was another, 
and will be more. 

And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre clothed 
with beauty at our curtain by night, at our table by day, — 
the apprehension, the assurance of a coming change. The 
race of mankind have always offered at least this implied 
thanks for the gift of existence, — namely, the terror of its 
being taken away ; the insatiable curiosity and appetite for its 
continuation. The whole revelation that is vouchsafed us, 
is, the gentle trust, which, in our experience we find, will 
cover also with flowers the slopes of this chasm. 

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. 
It is so well, that it is sure it will be well. It asks no ques- 
tions of the Supreme Power. The son of Antiochus asked 
his father, when he would join battle? "Dost thou fear," 
replied the King, " that thou only in all the army wilt not 
hear the trumpet ? " 'Tis a higher thing to confide, that, if 
it is best we should live, we shall live, — 'tis higher to have 
this conviction, than to have the lease of indefinite centuries 
and millenniums and aeons. Higher than the question of our 
duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will 
come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great 
soul in future, must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine 
too great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man's ex- 
perience but our own. It must be proved, if at all, from our 
own activity and designs, which imply an interminable future 
for their play. 

What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes. Such 
as you are, the gods themselves could not help you. Men 
are too often unfit to live, from their obvious inequality to 
their own necessities, or, they suffer from politics, or bad 
neighbors, or from sickness, and they would gladly know 
that they were to be dismissed from the duties of life. But 
the wise instinct asks, " How will death help them ? " These 
are not dismissed when they die. You shall not wish for 
death out of pusillanimity. The weight of the Universe is 
pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold 
him to his task. The only path of escape known in all the 
worlds of God is performance. You must do your work, 
before you shall be released. And as far as it is a question 



WORSHIP 305 

of fact respecting the government of the Universe, Marcus 
Antoninus summed the whole in a word, "It is pleasant to 
die, if there be gods ; and sad to live, if there be none." 

And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song 
which rises from all elements and all angels, is, a voluntary 
obedience, a necessitated freedom. Man is made of the same 
atoms as the world is, he shares the same impressions, pre- 
dispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, 
when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the 
sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do 
by structure. The religion which is to guide and fulfil the 
present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intel- 
lectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is 
science. " There are two things," said Mahomet, " which I 
abhor, the learned in his infidelities, and the fool in his de- 
votions." Our times are impatient of both, and specially of 
the last. Let us have nothing now which is not its own 
evidence. There is surely enough for the heart and imagina- 
tion in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with as- 
sertions and half-truths, with emotions and snuffie. 

There will be a new church founded on moral science, at 
first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra 
and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, 
without shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have 
heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for sym- 
bol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, 
picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as 
this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, 
shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him 
know that much of the time he must have himself to his 
friend. He shall expect no cooperation, he shall walk with 
no companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, 
the superpersonal Heart, — he shall repose alone on that. He 
needs only his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad 
fame can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers, the good 
Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, 
they animate him with the leading of great duty, and an end- 
less horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him who always 
recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels him- 
self in the presence of high causes. 



BEAUTY 

(i860) 

THE spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. 
Our books approach very slowly the things we most 
wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, 
and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects ! 
Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers 
talk of herbs of grace and healing ; but what does the botanist 
know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare 
the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he 
know what effect passes into the man who builds his house 
in them? What effect on the race that inhabits a granite 
shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium? 

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if 
he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit 
in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The 
want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His 
result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and 
inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skele- 
ton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes 
or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, 
is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the 
road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy 
had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, 
or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their 
names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. As- 
trology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead 
of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt 
the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders 
and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's 
, avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, re- 
mote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. 
Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy 

307 



308 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

which sought to transmute one element into another, to pro- 
long life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. 
All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than 
the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish 
so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers 
unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit 
light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us 
more than the pouring into microscopes, and is larger than 
can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer. 

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold them- 
selves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunder- 
bolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the 
flood of the flood, and fire of the fire ; he feels the antipodes 
and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension 
of his personality. His duties are measured by that instru- 
ment he is ; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the 
centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that we only 
believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert 
any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses 
us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes 
in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adver- 
sary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's 
blessing can heal ; that love can exalt talent ; can overcome 
all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow in- 
cessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble 
utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, 
and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon 
only his money value, — his intellect, his affection, as a sort 
of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, 
pictures, music and wine. 

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all 
sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his 
eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language 
of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind ; and, through his 
sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that 
is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, 
seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. 
The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help 
to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in 
your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science 



BEAUTY 309 

in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the 
name of love and moral purpose. There's a revenge for this 
inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The 
boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a 
kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all 
the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. 
He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science 
has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. 
Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of our- 
selves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a 
certificate of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of 
the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one 
day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. " See 
how happy," he said, " these browsing elks are ! Why should 
not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also 
amuse themselves ? " Returning home, he imparted this 
reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred 
the sovereignty on him, saying, " Prince, administer this 
empire for seven days : at the termination of that period, I 
shall put thee to death." At the end of the seventh day, the 
king inquired " From what cause hast thou become so emaci- 
ated ? " He answered, " From the horror of death." The 
monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast 
ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days 
I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple in- 
cessantly meditate on death ; how can they enter into health- 
ful diversions ? " But the men of science or the doctors or 
the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. 
The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate them- 
selves to their own details, and do not come out men of more 
force. Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of 
soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in 
man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the 
chicane ? 

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his 
superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law 
in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation 
to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of 
Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side 
with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an 

t hc v 



310 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks 
from it may yet light a conflagration in the other. Knowl- 
edge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and 
our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. 
These are facts of a science which we study without book, 
whose teachers and subjects are always near us. 

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our 
knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pa- 
thology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degrada- 
tions than angels or redeemers : but they all prove the trans- 
parency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a 
shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not less 
does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and good- 
ness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school- 
girls, " the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of 
well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks 
and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied 
power in all that well-known company that escort us through 
life, — we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, in- 
spire and enlarge us. 

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to 
study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there 
are many beauties ; as, of general nature, of the human face 
and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or 
beauty of the soul. 

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took posses- 
sion at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii 
were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the 
bodies which they governed; — : on an evil man, resting on 
his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They 
thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a 
new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the 
sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, 
though we give it our own names. We say, that every man 
is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our 
friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof 
we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, 
which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody 
knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees 
of ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. 



BEAUTY 311 

They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you 
detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the 
solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, 
the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they 
would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to 
be far off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain 
of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive 
the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for 
him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and 
acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him. 

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking 
of the foundations of things. Goethe said, " The beautiful is 
a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this 
appearance, had been ^forever concealed from us." And the 
working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement — much 
of it superficial and absurd enough — about works of art, 
which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, 
Greece and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he 
makes in the. science of beauty, above his possessions. The 
most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only 
commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as 
fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value. 

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to 
attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a 
few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is 
simple ; which has no superfluous parts ; which exactly 
answers its end ; which stands related to all things ; which 
is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring qual- 
ity, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, 
and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his 
eyes. Blind : — yes, because he does not see what he does not 
like ; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, 
for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the mytholo- 
gists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, 
to call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and 
the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an im- 
mortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide : nor can we 
express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot 
of the young soul. 

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of 



312 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that not 
one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some 
better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form 
in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some ex- 
cellence of structure : or beauty is only an invitation from 
what belongs to us. Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the 
same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest 
application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in 
the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase 
of fitness to its end is an increase of beauty. 

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic 
art, of antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth 
all the research, — namely, that all beauty must be organic; 
that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness 
of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom com- 
plexion: health of constitution that makes the sparkle and 
the power of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of 
the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace 
of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the 
deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master 
can never teach a badly built man to walk well. The tint 
of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the 
sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in build- 
ing rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain 
of the wood : refuses pilasters and columns that support 
nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly 
to show themselves. Every necessary or organic action 
pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a 
farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the 
carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, what- 
ever useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye. But if it is 
done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the 
sea! but ships in the theatre, — or ships kept for picturesque 
effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to 
stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour ! — What a dif- 
ference in effect between a battalion of troops marching to 
action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday ! 
In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay 
with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rust- 
ing under a wall, and poising it on the top of a stick, he set 



BEAUTY 313 

it turning, and made it describe the most elegant imaginable 
curves, and drew away attention from the decorated proces- 
sion by this startling beauty. 

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled 
that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing in- 
terests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams 
with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat be- 
yond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, 
that an order and method has been communicated to stones, 
so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime 
with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if 
the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any 
fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long 
nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the 
flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the sym- 
metry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more 
excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimu- 
lates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to 
watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the 
charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and 
the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, 
to recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not 
by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving move- 
ments. I have been told by persons of experience in matters 
of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and 
are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step 
onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cul- 
tivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. 
This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in 
our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike 
a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two 
to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of 
good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is 
offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who 
dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will know how 
to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and 
make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the 
just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law 
ranges ; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a 
little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come 




; 



314 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. 
Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which 
woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a 
coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it 
come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the 
beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation 
of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion 
of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and 
reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in 
our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for 
the immortality. 

One more text from the mythologists is to the same pur- 
pose, — Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests on necessities. 
The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The 
cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most 
strength with the least wax ; the bone or the quill of the bird 
gives the most alar strength, with the least weight. " It is 
the purgation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There 
is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a 
compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty 
of color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful 
arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous 
ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its 
strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of 
omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is 
proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the 
simplest way. 

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai. 
In all design, art lies in making your object prominent, but 
there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent. 
The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring from the in- 
stincts of the nations that created them. 

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house 
that I know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about 
closets and mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply 
because the tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I 
suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a 
century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the 
back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from 
danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in 



BEAUTY 315 

proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for 
centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to 
a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that 
they shall not perish. 

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely 
a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and 
reproduced without end. How many copies are there of the 
Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, 
the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects 
of tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon 
removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is 
copied and improved upon, so that all masons and car- 
penters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, 
whilst the ugly ones die out. 

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, 
are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches 
its perfection in the human form. All men are its 
lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and 
everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. 
" To Eve," say the Mahometans, " God gave two-thirds of 
all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming 
her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence, in 
all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must 
go with it, since a certain serenity is essential, but we love 
its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes that woman 
should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her 
face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, " Yes, I am willing 
to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any 
I yet behold." French memoir es of the fifteenth century cele- 
brate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accom- 
plished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her con- 
temporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of 
her native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil 
authorities to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony 
at least twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, 
the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in the 
last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Eliza- 
beth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of 
Coventry. Walpole says, " the concourse was so great, when 
the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on Friday, 



316 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered 
on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their 
doors to see them get into their chairs, and people go early 
to get places at the theatres, when it is known they will be 
there." " Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, " flock to see the 
Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all 
night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get into 
her post-chaise next morning." 

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of 
Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the 
Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, 
or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into 
beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beau- 
tiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes their 
form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the 
pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their 
words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on 
the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind ; 
teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and 
difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we 
fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression 
which passes from conversation into habit of style. 

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual 
effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on 
a handsome ground ; and we see faces every day which have 
a good type, but have been marred in the casting: a proof 
that we are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, 
if our ancestors had kept the laws, — as every lily and every 
rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and 
satirize us. Thus, short legs, which constrain us to short, 
mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and contumely 
to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual 
disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of 
mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose 
countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under 
water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster " so ugly and crabbed, 
that a sight of him would derange the ecstasies of the ortho- 
dox." Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a 
record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and 
folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and forms are 



BEAUTY 317 

irregular and unsymmetrical ; have one eye blue, and one 
gray ; the nose not straight ; and one shoulder higher than 
another; the hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is 
physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and 
patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, 
and a misfit from the start. 

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to be- 
tray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: 
and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a 
figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow 
on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a 
favor on the world. And yet — it is not beauty that inspires 
the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook with- 
out the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbe Me- 
nage said of the President Le Bailleul, " that he was fit for 
nothing but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram inti- 
mates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of 
beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is 
ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced 
to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or 
who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, 
after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the 
costume, how the least mistake in sentiment takes all the 
beauty out of your clothes, — affirm, that the secret of ugli- 
ness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting. 

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great 
qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, or invention, 
exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that 
usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. 
The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but 
he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, 
" With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity 
of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, 
" he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in Eng- 
land." " Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, " it behooves 
that I be bold." Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, 
Ben Jonson tells us, " was no pleasant man in countenance, 
his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and 
long." Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, 
for thousands of years, were not handsome men. If a man 



318 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread 
cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can 
subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of 
mankind, can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his 
nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether 
he has a nose at all ; whether his legs are straight, or whether 
his legs are amputated; his deformities will come to be 
reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This 
is the triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming 
us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that 
it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing 
our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid 
with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, 
that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. 
When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it 
is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an in- 
terior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty 
pides on her lion, as before. Still, " it was for beauty that 
the world was made." The lives of the Italian artists, who 
established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings 
and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in 
all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own. 
If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall 
draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good 
nature, and inscrutable meaning; — if a man can build a 
plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine 
palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of 
Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of 
geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his 
water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the deco- 
rations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of 
beauty. 

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes aston- 
ishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few 
months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly 
declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring our 
interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable 
in singular and salient talents, but also in the world of 
manners. 

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things 



BEAUTY 319 

are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they 
speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the 
reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is 
not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, " it 
swims on the light of forms." It is properly not in the 
form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and 
flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on 
the north star, would it be as beautiful ? The sea is lovely, 
but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near 
water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified 
at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of " a light 
that never was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied 
by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his country- 
women, that 

— " half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die." 

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a 
certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to 
the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful in- 
dividuality. Every natural feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, 
flowers, musical tone, — has in it somewhat which is not 
private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which 
is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in 
chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and 
manners, which is not of their person and family, but of a 
humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them 
as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their 
face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and 
justice. 

The feat of the imagination is in showing the converti- 
bility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had 
never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure 
as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick 
are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the 
facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the 
grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, 
treble, or centuple use and meaning. What ! has my stove 
and pepper-pot a false bottom ! I cry you mercy, good shoe- 
box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust 
begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. 



320 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic 
character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever 
give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which 
vibrated to some stroke of the imagination. 

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with 
the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, 
flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points 
at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the 
sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and 
wrong. Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat 
immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded 
by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of 
music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret 
architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the 
mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now 
another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been 
emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things. 

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one 
feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable in- 
toxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the 
eye, or a grace of manners, or a phrase of poetry, plants 
wings at our shoulders ; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, 
lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a 
truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that 
haughty force of beauty, "vis superba formce" which the 
poets praise, — under calm and precise outline, the immeas- 
urable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in 
its calm sky. 

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the 
antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the 
beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross 
and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure sham- 
bles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to 
wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot 
choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us 
the moral sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime. 
Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agree- 
able sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain 
affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the 
landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and 



BEAUTY 321 

tokens of thought and character in manners, up to the in- 
effable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, 
thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in 
his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe 
on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger 
tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe 
are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, — 
the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind. 



ENGLISH TRAITS 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

First Visit to England . 327 

Voyage to England 339 

Land 343 

Race 349 

Ability 365 

Manners 380 

Truth 387 

Character 393 

Cockayne 402 

Wealth 407 

Aristocracy 417 

Universities 432 

Relicion 440 

Literature . , 449 

The "Times" 465 

Stonehenge 471 

Personal 481 

Result 485 

Speech at Manchester 490 

(325) u hc v 



ENGLISH TRAITS 

(1856) 

CHAPTER I 

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 

I HAVE been twice in England. In 1833, on my return 
from a short tour in Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed 
from Boulogne, and landed in London at the Tower 
stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there were few 
people in the streets; and I remember the pleasure of that 
first walk on English ground, with my companion, an Ameri- 
can artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and the 
Strand, to a house in Russell Square, whither we had been 
recommended to good chambers. For the first time for .many 
months we were forced to check the saucy habit of travellers' 
criticism, as we could no longer speak aloud in the streets 
without being understood. The shop-signs spoke our lan- 
guage; our country names were on the door-plates; and the 
public and private buildings wore a more native and wonted 
front. 

Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted 
to the men of Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review, — 
to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam. and to Scott, Playfair, and 
De Quincey; and my narrow and desultory reading had in- 
spired the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, — 
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the latest 
and strongest contributor to the critical journals, Carlyle; 
and I suppose if I had sifted the reasons that led me to 
Europe, when I was ill and was advised to travel, it was 
mainly the attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been 
still living, I might have wandered into Germany also. Be- 
sides those I have named (for Scott was dead), there was 

327 



328 ENGLISH TRAITS 

not in Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, unless 
it were the Duke of Wellington, whom I afterwards saw at 
Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. The 
young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people 
who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that 
they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot 
apply themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success 
are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do 
not leave that frolic liberty which only can encounter a com- 
panion on the best terms. It is probable you left some ob- 
scure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother- 
wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to 
play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however, found 
writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief, 
that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impedi- 
ments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of 
having been met, and a larger horizon. 

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833 I find 
nothing to publish in my memoranda of visits to places. 
But I have copied a few. notes I made of visits to persons, 
as they respect parties quite too good and too transparent 
to the whole world to make it needful to affect any prudery 
of suppression about a few hints of those bright personalities. 

At Florence, chief among artists I found Horatio Green- 
ough, the American sculptor. His face was so handsome, 
and his person so well formed, that he might be pardoned, 
if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora, and the figure 
of a colossal Achilles in clay, were idealizations of his own. 
Greenough was a superior man, ardent and eloquent, and all 
his opinions had elevation and magnanimity. He believed 
that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities, — 
the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, 
and inflaming them with it, and when -his strength was spent, 
a new hand, with equal heat, continued the work; and so 
by relays, until it was finished in every part with equal fire. 
This was necessary in so refractory a material as stone; and 
he thought art would never prosper until we left our shy | 
jealous ways, and worked in society as they. All his thoughts 
breathed the same generosity. He was an accurate and a 
deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks, and impatient j 

1 
i 

: 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 329 

of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, published in 1843, 
announced in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin 
on the morality in architecture, notwithstanding the antag- 
onism in their views of the history of art. I have a private 
letter from him. — later, but respecting the same period, — in 
which he roughly sketches his own theory. " Here is my 
theory of structure : A scientific arrangement of spaces and 
forms to functions and to site; an emphasis of features pro- 
portioned to their gradated importance in function ; color and 
ornament to.be decided and arranged and varied by strictly 
organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision ; the 
entire and immediate banishment of all make-shift and make- 
believe." 

Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an in- 
vitation from Mr. Landor, who lived at San Domenica di 
Fiesole. On the 15th May I dined with Mr. Landor. I found 
him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his 
Villa Gherardesca ; a fine house commanding a beautiful land- 
scape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified from 
some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath, — an un- 
tamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation 
were just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy 
veiled that haughty mind, and he was the most patient and 
gentle of hosts. He praised the beautiful cyclamen which grows 
all about Florence; he admired Washington; talked of 
Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To 
be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and 
is well content to impress, if possible, his English whim upon 
the immutable past. No great man ever had a great son, 
if Philip and Alexander be not an exception ; and Philip 
he calls the greater man. In art he loves the Greeks, and in 
sculpture, them only. He prefers the Venus to everything 
else, and, after that, the head of Alexander in the gallery 
here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michael Angelo; in 
painting, Raffaelle; and shares the growing taste for Peru- 
gino and the early masters. The Greek histories he thought 
the only good; and after them, Voltaire's. I could not make 
him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent friends ; Mon- 
taigne very cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed un- 
discriminating. He thought Degerando indebted to " Lucas 



330 ENGLISH TRAITS 

on Happiness " and " Lucas on Holiness " ! He pestered me 
with Southey ; but who is Southey ? 

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did 
not fail to go, and this time with Greenough. He enter- 
tained us at once with reciting half a dozen hexameter lines 
of Julius Caesar's ! — from Donatus, he said. He glorified 
Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, and under- 
valued Burke, and undervalued Socrates; designated as three 
of the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon; 
much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the three or 
the six best pears " for a small orchard " ; and did not even 
omit to remark the similar termination of their names. " A 
great man," he said, " should make great sacrifices, and kill his 
hundred oxen without knowing whether they would be con- 
sumed by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat 
them." I had visited Professor Amici, who had shown me his 
microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand diam- 
eters ; and I spoke of the uses to which they were applied. 
Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, 
" the sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I teased 
him about recent writers, but he professed never to have 
heard of Herschel, not even by name. One room full of 
pictures, which he likes to show, especially one piece, stand- 
ing before which, he said " he would give fifty guineas to 
the man that would swear it was a Domenichino." I was 

more curious to see his library, but Mr. H , one of the 

guests, told me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and 
has never more than a dozen at a time in his house. 

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which 
the English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their com- 
manding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, vio- 
lent, and inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by what chance 
converted to letters, in which there is not a style nor a tint 
not known to him, yet with an English appetite for action 
and heroes. The thing done avails, and not what is said 
about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more 
than all the censures. Landor is strangely undervalued in 
England; usually ignored; and sometimes savagely at- 
tacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right, or wrong, 
and is quickly forgotten ; but year after year the scholar must 






FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 331 

still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences — 
for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unforgetable. 

From London, on the 15th August, I went to Highgate, and 
wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my 
respects to him. It was near noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a 
verbal message, that he was in bed, but if I would call after 
one o'clock, he would see me. I returned at one, and he 
appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes and 
fine clear complexion, leaning on his cane. He took snuff 
freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit. 
He asked whether I knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his 
merits and doings when he knew him in Rome; what a 
master of the Titianesque he was, &c, &c. He spoke of Dr. 
Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune that he should 
have turned out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into 
a declamation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, — 
its high unreasonableness; and taking up Bishop Water- 
land's book, which lay on the table, he read with vehemence 
two or three pages written by himself in the fly-leaves, — 
passages, too, which, I believe, are printed in the " Aids to 
Reflection." When he stopped to take breath, I interposed 
that, " whilst I highly valued all his explanations, I was 
bound to tell him that I was born and bred a Unitarian." 
" Yes," he said, " I supposed so ;" and continued as before. 
" It was a wonder that after so many ages of unquestioning 
acquiescence in the doctrine of St. Paul, — the doctrine of the 
Trinity, which was also, according to Philo Judaeus, the doc- 
trine of the Jews before Christ, — this handful of Priestleians 
should take on themselves to deny it, &c, &c. He was very 
sorry that Dr. Channing, — a man to whom he looked up, — 
no, to say that he looked up to him would be to speak falsely ; 
but a man whom he looked at with so much interest, — 
should embrace such views. When he saw Dr. Channing, 
he had hinted to him that he was afraid he loved Christianity 
for what was lovely and excellent, — he loved the good in it, 
and not the true; and I tell you, sir, that I have known ten 
persons who loved the good, for one person who loved the 
true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the true for itself 
alone, than to love the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) 






332 ENGLISH TRAITS 

knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had 
once been a Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was. He 
had been called ' the rising star of Unitarianism.' " He 
went on denning, or rather refining: "The Trinitarian doc- 
trine was realism; the idea of God was not essential, but 
super-essential ;" talked of trinism tetrakism, and much more, 
of which I only caught this, " that the will was that by which 
a person is a person; because, if one should push me in 
the street, and so I should force the man next me 
into the kennel, I should at once exclaim, ' I did not do it, 
sir,' meaning it was not my will." And this also, "that if 
you should insist on your faith here in England, and I on 
mine, mine would be the hotter side of the fagot." 

I took advantage of a pause to say that he had many readers 
of all religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to in- 
quire if the " extract " from the Independent's pamphlet, in 
the third volume of the Friend, were a veritable quotation. 
He replied that it was really taken from a pamphlet in his 
possession, entitled " A Protest of one of the Independents," 
or something to that effect. I told him how excellent I 
thought it, and how much I wished to see the entire work. 
" Yes," he said, " the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked 
the knowledge that God was a God of order. Yet the pas- 
sage would no doubt strike you more in the quotation than 
in the original, for I have filtered it." 

When I rose to go, he said, " I do not know whether you 
care about poetry, but I will repeat some verses I lately made 
on my baptismal anniversary," and he recited with strong em- 
phasis, standing, ten or twelve lines, beginning, 

"Born unto God in Christ—" 

He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning 
that I had been in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island 
with the other, " repeating what he had said to the Bishop of 
London when he returned from that country, that Sicily was 
an excellent school of political economy; for, in any town 
there, it only needed to ask what the government enacted, 
and reverse that to know what ought to be done; it was the 
most felicitously opposite legislation to anything good and 
wise. There were only three things which the government 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 333 

had brought into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox, 
and famine. Whereas, in Malta, the force of law and mind 
was seen, in making that barren rock of semi-Saracen inhabi- 
tants the seat of population and plenty." Going out, he 
showed me in the next apartment a picture of Allston's and 
told me " that Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see 
him, and, glancing towards this, said, ' Well, you have got 
a picture ! ' thinking it the work of an old master ; afterwards, 
Montague, still talking with his back to the canvas, put up 
his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, ' By Heaven ! this 
picture is not ten years old:' — so delicate and skilful was 
that man's touch." 

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impos- 
sible to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was 
often like so many printed paragraphs in his book, — perhaps 
the same, — so readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. 
As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle 
than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my 
curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend 
to a new companion and think with him. 

From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return, 
I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on de- 
livering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired 
for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish 
of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed 
near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found 
the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely 
scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from 
his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his 
readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and 
exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms 
what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff- 
like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers 
of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern 
accent with evident relish; full of lively aneciote, and with 
a streaming humor, which floated everything he looked upon. 
His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects put the com- 
panion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Le- 
murs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined 



334 ENGLISH TRAITS 

to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely 
the man, " not a person to speak to within sixteen miles 
except the minister of Dunscore " ; so that books inevitably 
made his topics. 

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his 
discourse. " Blackwood's " was the " sand magazine ; " "Fra- 
ser's " nearer approach to possibility of life was the " mud 
magazine " ; a piece of road near by that marked some failed 
enterprise was the " grave of the last sixpence." When 
too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed 
hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent 
much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to 
one enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judg- 
ment, had found out how to let a board down and had foiled 
him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little 
fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death " Qualis arti- 
fex pereo ! " better than most history. He worships a man 
that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had 
inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's 
principle was mere rebellion, and that he feared was the 
American principle. The best thing he knew of that country 
was that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had 
read in Stewart's book that when he inquired in a New York 
hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street and 
had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey. 

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he dis- 
paraged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making 
Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from 
the old world to the new. His own reading had been multi- 
farious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after 
Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson's America an early favorite. 
Rousseau's Confessions had discovered to him that he was 
not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned 
German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find 
in that language what he wanted. 

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this 
moment ; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year 
by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that 
no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the 
booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy. 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 335 

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded 
country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public 
persons perform. " Government should direct poor men what 
to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors. 
My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam 
bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But 
here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, 
and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. 
They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich 
people to attend to them." 

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Crifrel, 
then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. 
There we sat down, and talked of the immortality of the soul. 
It was not Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he 
had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise 
itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where 
no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cog- 
nizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw 
how every event affects all the future. "Christ died on the 
tree : that built Dunscore kirk yonder : that brought you and 
me together. Time has only a relative existence." 

He was already turning his eyes towards London with a 
scholar's appreciation. London is the heart of the world, 
he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. 
He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. 
The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour 
every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to 
know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He 
named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his 
friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served. 

On the 28th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my 
respects to Mr. Wordsworth. His daughters called in their 
father, a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, 
and disfigured by gree goggles. He sat down and talked with 
great simplicity. He had just returned from a journey. His 
health was good, but be had broken a tooth by a fall, when 
walking with two lawyers, and had said that he was glad it 
did not happen forty years ago ; whereupon they had praised 
his philosophy. 



336 ENGLISH TRAITS 

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave oc- 
casion for his favorite topic, — that society is being enlight- 
ened by a superfical tuition, out of all proportion to its being 
restrained by moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition 
is not education. He thinks more of the education of cir- 
cumstances than of tuition. 'Tis not question whether there 
are offences of which the law takes cognizance, but whether 
there are offences of which the law does not take cognizance. 
Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape without 
gravest mischiefs from this source — ? He has even said, 
what seemed a paradox, that they needed a civil war in 
America, to teach the necessity of knitting the social ties 
stronger. " There may be," he said, " in America some vul- 
garity in manner, but that's not important. That comes of 
the pioneer state of things. But I fear they are too much 
given to the making of money ; and secondly to politics ; that 
they make political distinction the end, and not the means. 
And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure, — in short, of 
gentlemen, — to give a tone of honor to the community. I 
am told that things are boasted of in the second class of so- 
ciety there, which, in England, — God knows, are done in Eng- 
land every day. — but would never be spoken of. In Amer- 
ica I wish to know not how many churches or schools, but 
what newspapers? My friend, Colonel Hamilton, at the 
foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures me that 
the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Con- 
gress of stealing spoons ! " He was against taking off the 
tax on newspapers in England which the reformers represent 
as a tax upon knowledge, for this reason, that they would be 
inundated with base prints. He said, he talked on political 
aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good Ameri- 
cans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c, &c, and 
never to call into action the physical strength of the people, 
as had just now been done in England in the Reform Bill, — 
a thing prophesied by Delolme. He alluded once or twice to 
his conversation with Dr. Channing, who had recently visited 
him (laying his hand on a particular chair in which the 
Doctor had sat). 

The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he esteems 
a far higher poet than Virgil : not in his system, which is 



FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND 337 

nothing, but in his power of illustration. Faith is necessary 
to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of 
God with human evil. Of Cousin (whose lectures we had 
all been reading in Boston), he knew only the name. 

I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical articles and 
translations. He said he thought him sometimes insane. 
He proceeded to abuse Goethe's Wilhelm Meister heartily. 
It was full of all manner of fornication. It was like the 
crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone farther than 
the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book 
across the room. I deprecated this wrath, and said what I 
could for the better parts of the book; and he courteously 
promised to look at it again. Carlyle, he said, wrote most 
obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he defied the sym- 
pathies of everybody. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more 
clearly, though he had always wished Coleridge would write 
more to be understood. He led me out into his garden, and 
showed me the gravel walk in which thousands of his lines 
were composed. His eyes are much inflamed. This is no 
loss, except for reading, because he never writes prose, and 
of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his head before 
writing them. He had just returned from a visit to Staff a, 
and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal's 
Cave, and was composing a fourth when he was called in to 
see me. He said, " If you are interested in my verses, per- 
haps you will like to hear these lines." I gladly assented; 
and he recollected himself for a few moments, and then stood 
forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire son- 
nets with great animation. I fancied the second and third 
more beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third 
is addressed to the flowers, which, he said, especially the ox- 
eye daisy, are very abundant on the top of the rock. The 
second alludes to the name of the cave, which is " Cave of 
Music " ; the first to the circumstance of its being visited by 
the promiscuous company of the steamboat. 

This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising, — he, 
the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a 
garden-walk, like a schoolboy declaiming, — that I at first was 
near to laugh; but recollecting myself, that I had come thus 
far to see a poet, and he was chanting poems to me, I saw that 



338 ENGLISH TRAITS 

he was right and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself 
up to hear. I told him how much the few printed extracts 
had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished poems. 
He replied, he never was in haste to publish; partly because 
he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously 
received after printing; but what he had written would be 
printed, whether he lived or died. I said " Tintern Abbey " 
appeared to be the favorite poem with the public, but more 
contemplative readers preferred the first books of the " Ex- 
cursion," and the Sonnets. He said, " Yes, they are better." 
He preferred such of his poems as touched the affections 
to any others; for whatever is didactic — what theories of 
society, and so on — might perish quickly; but whatever com- 
bined a truth with an affection was xrrjfxa e? aei, good to-day 
and good forever. He cited the sonnet, " On the feelings of 
a high-minded Spaniard " which he preferred to any other 
(I so understood him), and the "Two Voices"; and quoted 
with evident pleasure, the verses addressed " To the Skylark." 
In this connection he said of the Newtonian theory that it 
might yet be superseded and forgotten; and Dalton's atomic 
theory. 

When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show me 
what a common person in England could do, and he led 
me into the enclosure of his clerk, a young man, to whom 
he had given this slip of ground, which was laid out, or its 
natural capabilities shown, with much taste. He then said he 
would show me a better way towards the inn ; and he walked 
a good part of a mile, talking, and ever and anon stopping 
short to impress the word or the verse, and finally parted 
from me with great kindness, and returned across the fields. 

Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to 
truth, and was very willing not to shine ; but he surprised by 
the hard limits of his thought. To judge from a single con- 
versation, he made the impression of a narrow and very 
English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by 
general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his 
opinions were of no value. It is not very rare to find persons 
loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their departure from 
the common in one direction by their conformity in every 
other. 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND 339 

CHAPTER II 

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND 

The occasion of my second visit to England was an in- 
vitation from some Mechanics' Institutes in Lancashire 
and Yorkshire, which separately are organized much in 
the same way as our New England Lyceums, but, in 
1847, had been linked into a " Union," which embraced 
twenty or thirty towns and cities, and presently extended 
into the middle counties, and northward into Scotland. I 
was invited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures in 
them all. The request was urged with every kind suggestion, 
and every assurance of aid and comfort, by friendliest parties 
in Manchester, who, in the sequel, amply redeemed their word. 
The remuneration was equivalent to the fees at that time 
paid in this country for the like services. At all events, 
it was sufficient to cover any travelling expenses, and the 
proposal offered an excellent opportunity of seeing the in- 
terior of England and Scotland, by means of a home, and a 
committee of intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town. 

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good traveller, nor 
have I found that long journeys yield a fair share of reason- 
able hours. But the invitation was repeated and pressed at 
a moment of more leisure, and when I was a little spent by 
some unusual studies. I wanted a change and a tonic, and 
England was proposed to me. Besides, there were at least, 
the dread attraction and salutary influences of the sea. So 
I took my berth in the packet-ship Washington Irving, and 
sailed from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October, 1847. 

On Friday, at noon, we had only made one hundred and 
thirty-four miles. A nimble Indian would have swum as far; 
but the captain affirmed that the ship would show us in time 
all her paces, and we crept along through the floating drift 
of boards, logs, and chips, which the rivers of Maine and New 
Brunswick pour into the sea after a freshet. 

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day's work in 
four, the storm came, the winds blew, and we flew before 
a north-wester, which strained every rope and sail. The 
good ship darts through the water all day, all night, like a 



340 ENGLISH TRAITS 

fish, quivering with speed, gliding through liquid leagues, 
sliding from horizon to horizon. She has passed Cape Sable ; 
she has reached the Banks; the land-birds are left; gulls, 
haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and hover around; no 
fishermen ; she has passed the Banks ; left five sail behind her, 
far on the edge of the west at sundown, which were far 
east of us at morn, — though they say at sea a stern chase is 
a long race, — and still we fly for our lives. The shortest 
sea-line from Boston to Liverpool is 2850 miles. This a 
steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles. A sailing ship can never 
go in a shorter line than 3000, and usually it is much longer. 
Our good master keeps his kites up to the last moment, stud- 
ding-sails alow and aloft, and, by incessant straight steering, 
never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of the 
ship, — watch on watch, for advantage and for life. Since 
the ship was built, it seems, the master never slept but in his 
day-clothes whilst on board. " There are many advantages," 
says Saadi, " in sea-voyaging, but security is not one of them." 
Yet in hurrying over these abysses, whatever dangers we are 
running into, we are certainly running out of the risks of 
hundreds of miles every day, which have their own chances 
of squall, collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and thunder. Hour 
for hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater; but the speed 
is safety, or, twelve days of danger, instead of twenty-four. 
Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed perhaps, with 
all her freight, 1500 tons. The mainmast, from the deck to 
the top-button, measured 115 feet; the length of the deck, 
from stem to stern, 155. It is impossible not to personify a 
ship ; everybody does, in everything they say : — she behaves 
well ; she minds her rudder ; she swims like a duck ; she runs 
her nose into the water ; she looks into a port. Then that "' 
wonderful esprit dn corps, by which we adopt into our self- ■ 
love everything we touch, makes us all champions of her 
sailing qualities. 

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week she L 
bas made 1467 miles, and now, at night, seems to hear the 
steamer behind her. which left Boston to-day at two, hasj 
mended her speed, and is flying before the gray south wind 
eleven and a half knots the hour. The sea-fire shines in her 
wake, and far around wherever a wave breaks. I read the' 



VOYAGE TO ENGLAND 341 

hour, 9h. 45', on my watch by this light. Near the equator, 
you can read small print by it; and the mate describes the 
phosphoric insects, when taken up in a pail, as shaped like 
a Carolina potato. 

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes 
and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise,' and odor 
are not to be dispensed with. The floor of your room is 
sloped at an angle of twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked 
every morning with the belief that some one was tipping up 
my berth. Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset, 
shoved against the side of the house, rolled over, suffocated 
with bilge, mephitis, and stewing oil. We get used to these 
annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea remains longer. 
The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, 
what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, 
filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney 
conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored 
circle an eternal cemetery ? In our graveyards we scoop a pit, 
but this aggressive water opens mile-wide pits and chasms, and 
makes a mouthful of a fleet. To the geologist, the sea is the 
only firmament; the land is in perpetual flux and change, 
now blown up like a tumor, now sunk in a chasm, and the 
registered observations of a few hundred years find it in a 
perpetual tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps its old level ; 
and 'tis no wonder that the history of our race is so recent, if 
the roar of the ocean is silencing our traditions. A rising 
of the sea, such as has been observed, say an inch in a century, 
from east to west on the land, will bury all the towns, monu- 
ments, bones, and knowledge of mankind, steadily and in- 
sensibly. If it is capable of these great and secular mischiefs, 
it is quite as ready at private and local damage ; and of this 
no landsman seems so fearful a's the seaman. Such discom- 
fort and such danger as the narratives of the captain and 
mate disclose are bad enough as the costly fee we pay for 
entrance to Europe; but the wonder is always new that any 
sane man can be a sailor. And here, on the second day of 
our voyage, stepped out a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, who 
had hid himself, whilst the ship was in port, in the bread- 
closet, having no money, and wishing to go to England. 
The sailors have dressed him in Guernsey frock, with a knife 

v HCV 



342 ENGLISH TRAITS 

in his belt, and he is climbing nimbly about after them, 
" likes the work first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, 
means now to come back again in the ship." The mate avers 
that this is the history of all sailors ; nine out of ten are run- 
away boys ; and adds that all of them are sick of the sea, but 
stay in it out of pride. Jack has a life of risks, incessant 
abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little better with the mate, 
and not very much better with the captain. A hundred 
dollars a month is reckoned high pay. If sailors were con- 
tented, if they had not resolved again and again not to go 
to sea any more, I should respect them. 

Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea are 
not of any account to those whose minds are preoccupied. 
The water-laws, arctic frost, the mountain, the mine, only 
shatter cockneyism; every noble activity makes room for 
itself. A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. 
And the sea is not slow in disclosing inestimable secrets to 
a good naturalist. 

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of 
liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad 
company, and taverns steal from the best economist. Classics 
which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a 
country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig. I re- 
member that some of the happiest and most valuable hours 
I have owed to books, passed many years ago, on shipboard. 
The worst impediment I have found at sea is the want of 
light in the cabin. 

We found on board the usual cabin library: Basil Hall, 
Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our sea-gods. 
Among the passengers, there was some variety of talent and 
profession; we exchanged our experiences, and all learned 
something. The busiest talk with leisure and convenience 
at sea, and sometimes a memorable fact turns up, which you 
have long had a vacant niche for, and seize with the joy of 
a collector. But, under the best conditions, a voyage is one 1 
of the severest tests to try a man. A college examination t 
is nothing to it. Sea-days are long, — these lack-lustre, joy- 
less days which whistled over us; but they were few, — only 
fifteen, as the captain counted, sixteen according to me. !] 
Reckoned from the time when we left soundings, our speed fe 



LAND 343 

was such that the captain drew the line of his course in red 
ink on his chart, for the encouragement or envy of future 
navigators. 

It has been said that the King of England would consult his 
dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassadors in the 
cabin of a man-of-war. And I think the white path of an 
Atlantic ship the right avenue to the palace front of this 
seafaring people, who for hundreds of years claimed the strict 
sovereignty of the sea, and exacted toll and the striking 
sail from the ships of all other peoples. When their privilege 
was disputed by the Dutch and other junior marines, on the 
plea that you could never anchor on the same wave, or hold 
property in what was always flowing, the English did not stick 
to claim the channel, or bottom of all the main. " As if," 
said they, " we contended for the drops of the sea, and not 
for its situation, or the bed of those waters. The sea is 
bounded by his majesty's empire." 

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was 
inevitably the British side. In every man's thought arises 
now a new system, English sentiments, English loves and 
fears, English history and social modes. Yesterday, every 
passenger had measured the speed of the ship by watching 
the bubbles over the ship's bulwarks. To-day, instead of 
bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork, Waterford, and Ard- 
more. There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast 
of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; 
but the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern. 



CHAPTER III 

LAND 

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries worth 
living in; the former, because there nature vindicates her 
rights, and triumphs over the evils inflicted by the govern- 
ments; the latter, because art conquers nature, and trans- 
forms a rude, ungenial land into a paradise of com- 
fort and plenty. England is a garden. Under an ash-colored 
sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear 



344 ENGLISH TRAITS 

to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough. The 
solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the 
industry of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, 
valleys, the sea itself feel the hand of a master. The long 
habitation of a powerful and ingenious race has turned every 
rood of land to its best use, has found all the capabilities, the 
arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the byways, 
the fords, the navigable waters ; and the new arts of inter- 
course meet you everywhere ; so that England is a huge phal- 
anstery, where all that man wants is provided within the 
precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every manner, the 
traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers 
and towns, through mountains, in tunnels of three or four 
miles, at near twice the speed of our trains ; and reads quietly 
the Times newspaper, which, by its immense correspondence 
and reporting, seems to have machinized the rest of the 
world for his occasion. 

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why 
England is England? What are the elements of that power 
which the English hold over other nations? If there be one 
test of national genius universally accepted, it is success ; and 
if there be one successful country in the universe for the 
last millennium, that country is England. 

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of 
actual nations; and an American has more reasons than 
another to draw him to Britain. In all that is done or begun 
by the Americans towards right thinking or practice, we are 
met by a civilization already settled and overpowering. The 
culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, are En- 
glish thoughts and aims. A nation considerable for a thousand 
years since Egbert, it has, in the last centuries, obtained the 
ascendant, and stamped the knowledge, activity, and power 
of mankind with its impress. Those who resist it do not feel 
it or obey it less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be 
English. The Turk and Chinese also are making awkward 
efforts to be English. The practical common-sense of modern 
society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, 
religion take, is the natural genius of the British mind. The 
influence of France is a constituent of modern civility, but 
not enough opposed to the English for the most wholesome 



LAND 345 

effect. The American is only the continuation of the English 
genius into new conditions, more or less propitious. 

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, 
every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still 
English history and manners. So that a sensible English- 
man once said to me, " As long as you do not grant us copy- 
right, we shall have the teaching of you." 

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or 
moral estimate of England; as the sheriff finds in drawing a 
jury to try some cause which has agitated the whole com- 
munity, and on which everybody finds himself an interested 
party. Officers, jurors, judges have all taken sides. England 
has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence, 
and tastes ; and, to resist the tyranny and prepossession of the 
British element, a serious man must aid himself, by comparing 
with it the civilizations of the farthest east and west, the old 
Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if 
only by means of the very impatience which English forms 
are sure to awaken in independent minds. 

Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best 
time, as some signs portend that it has reached its highest 
point. It is observed that the English interest us a little less 
within a few years ; and hence the impression that the British 
power has culminated, is in solstice, or already declining. 

As soon as you enter England, which with Wales, is no 
larger than the State of Georgia, 1 this little land stretches 
by an illusion to the dimensions of an empire. The innu- 
merable details, the crowded succession of towns, cities, cathe- 
drals, castles, and great and decorated estates, the number 
and power of the trades and guilds, the military strength and 
splendor, the multitudes of rich and remarkable people, the 
servants and equipages, — all these catching the eye, and 
never allowing it to pause, hide all boundaries by the im- 
pression of magnificence and endless wealth. 

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that 
object indispensably to be seen, — Yes, to see England well 
needs a hundred years ; for, what they told me was the merit 
of Sir John Soane's Museum, in London, — that it was well 

1 Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equivalent for the 
area of Scotland. 



346 ENGLISH TRAITS 

packed and well saved, — is the merit of England; — it is 
stuffed full, in all corners and crevices, with towns, towers, 
churches, villas, palaces, hospitals, and charity-houses. In 
the history of art it is a long way from a cromlech to York 
minster; yet all the intermediate steps may still be traced 
in this all-preserving island. 

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is 
warmer by many degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. 
Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the whole year 
when one cannot work. Here is no winter, but such days 
as we have in Massachusetts in November, a temperature 
which makes no exhausting demand on human strength, 
but allows the attainment of the largest stature. Charles 
the Second said, " it invited men abroad more days in the 
year and more hours in the day than another country." Then 
England has all the materials of a working country except 
wood. The constant rain, — a rain with every tide in some parts 
of the island, — keeps its multitude of rivers full, and brings 
agricultural production up to the highest point. It has 
plenty of water, of stone, of potter's clay, of coal, of salt, and 
of iron. The land naturally abounds with game; immense 
heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse, and wood- 
cock, and the shores are animated by water birds. The 
rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; there are 
salmon for the rich, and sprats and herrings for the poor. 
In the northern lochs the herring are in innumerable shoals; 
at one season, the country people say, the lakes contain 
one part water and two parts fish. 

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the 
darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly of 
a color. It strains the eyes to read and to write. Add 
the coal smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the fine soot 
or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color of black 
sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison 
many plants, and corrode the monuments and buildings. 

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and 
sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an English 
wit, " in a fine day, looking up a chimney ; in a foul day, 
looking down one." A gentleman in Liverpool told me that 
he found he could do without a fire in his parlor about one 



LAND 347 

day in the year. It is, however, pretended that the enormous 
consumption of coal in the island is also felt in modifying 
the general climate. 

Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles 
a ship in its shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could 
not have worked it, or anchored it in a more judicious or 
effective position. Sir John Herschel said, " London was 
the centre of the terrene globe." The shopkeeping nation, 
to use a shop word, has a good stand. The old Venetians 
pleased themselves with the flattery that Venice was in 45 , 
midway between the poles and the line; as if that were 
an imperial centrality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied 
Delphi the navel of the earth, in their favorite mode of 
fabling the earth to be an animal. The Jews believed Jeru- 
salem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart 
designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the 
same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of 
empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was 
drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with 
pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut 
Street. But when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, 
and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious 
scholars of all those capitals. 

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right 
in the heart of the modern world. The sea, which, according 
to Virgil's famous line, divided the poor Britons utterly from 
the world, proved to be the ring of marriage with all nations. 
It is not down in the books, — it is written only in the geologic 
strata, — that fortunate day when a wave of the German 
Ocean burst the old isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall 
to France, and gave to this fragment of Europe its impreg- 
nable sea wall, cutting off an island of eight hundred miles 
in length, with an irregular breadth reaching to three 
hundred miles ; a territory large enough for independence en- 
riched with every seed of national power, so near, that it 
can see the harvests of the continent; and so far, that who 
would cross the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for 
tempests. As America, Europe, and Asia lie, these Britons 
have precisely the best commercial position in the whole 
planet, and are sure of a market for all the goods they can 



348 ENGLISH TRAITS 

manufacture. And to make these advantages avail, the river 
Thames must dig its spacious outlet to the sea from the 
heart of the kingdom, giving road and landing to innumer- 
able ships, and all the conveniency to trade, that a people 
so skilful and sufficient in economizing water-front by docks, 
warehouses, and lighters required. When James the First 
declared his purpose of punishing London by removing his 
Court, the Lord Mayor replied, " that, in removing his 
royal presence from his lieges, they hoped he would leave 
them the Thames." 

In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe, 
having plain, forest, marsh, river, seashore; mines in Corn- 
wall; caves in Matlock and Derbyshire; delicious landscape 
in Dovedale, delicious sea-view at Tor Bay, Highlands in 
Scotland, Snowdon in Wales; and, in Westmoreland and 
Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland, in which the lakes and 
mountains are on a sufficient scale to fill the eye and touch 
the imagination. It is a nation conveniently small. Fonte- 
nelle thought that nature had sometimes a little affectation; 
and there is such an artificial completeness in this nation 
of artificers, as if there were a design from the beginning 
to elaborate a bigger Birmingham. Nature held counsel 
with herself, and said, " My Romans are gone. To build my 
new empire, I will choose a rude race, all masculine, with bru- 
tish strength. I will not grudge a competition of the roughest 
males. Let buffalo gore buffalo and the pasture to the strong- 
est ! For I have work that requires .the best will and sinew. 
Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, to keep that 
will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from 
others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give 
them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them 
on their feet, by poverty, border-wars, seafaring, sea-risks, 
and the stimulus of gain. An island, — but not so large, the 
people not so many, as to glut the great markets and de- 
press one another, but proportioned to the size of Europe 
and the continents." 

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil in- 
fluence radiate. It is a singular coincidence to this geo- 
graphic centrality, the spiritual centrality, which Emanuel 
Swedenborg ascribes to the people. " For the English 



RACE 349 

nation, the best of them are in the centre of all Christians, 
because they have interior intellectual light. This appears 
conspicuously in the spiritual world. This light they derive 
from the liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of 
thinking." 



CHAPTER IV 

RACE 

An ingenious anatomist has written a book 1 to prove that 
races are imperishable, but nations are pliant political con- 
structions, easily changed or destroyed. But this writer 
did not found his assumed races on any necessary law, dis- 
closing their ideal or metaphysical necessity; nor did he, 
on the other hand, count with precision the existing races, 
and settle the true bounds ; a point of nicety, and the popular 
test of the theory. The individuals at the extremes of diver- 
gence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the 
lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into 
the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins 
or ends. Hence every writer makes a different count. 
Blumenbach reckons five races ; Humboldt three ; and Mr. 
Pickering, who lately, in our Exploring Expedition, thinks 
he saw all kinds of men that can be on the planet, makes 
eleven. 

The British Empire is reckoned to contain 222,000,000 souls, 
— perhapsa fifth of the population of the globe; and tocomprise 
a territory of 5,000,000 square miles. So far have British 
people predominated. Perhaps forty of these millions are 
of British stock. Add the United States of America, which 
reckon, exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a ter- 
ritory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the foreign 
element, however considerable, is rapidly assimilated, and 
you have a population of English descent and language 
of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000 
souls. 

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a 
half millions in the home countries. What makes this cen- 

x The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Knox. London, 1850. 



350 ENGLISH TRAITS 

sits important is the quality of the units that compose it. 
They are free forcible men, in a country where life is safe, 
and has reached the greatest value. They give the bias to 
the current age; and that, not by chance or by mass, but by 
their character, and by the number of individuals among 
them of personal ability. It has been denied that the 
English have genius. Be it as it may, men of vast intellect 
have been born on their soil, and they have made or applied 
the principal inventions. They have sound bodies, and su- 
preme endurance in war and in labor. The spawning force 
of the race has sufficed to the colonization of great parts 
of the world; yet it remains to be seen whether they can 
make good the exodus of millions from Great Britain, 
amounting, in 1852, to more than a thousand a day. They 
have assimilating force, since they are imitated by their 
foreign subjects; and they are still aggressive and propa- 
gandist, enlarging the dominion of their arts and liberty. 
Their laws are hospitable, and slavery does not exist under 
them. What oppression exists is incidental and temporary; 
their success is not sudden or fortunate, but they have main- 
tained constancy and self-equality for many ages. 

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause? 
Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every- 
body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed 
to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, 
nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior 
brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him. 

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that 
law of physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential 
organ is found in one healthy individual, the same part or 
organ may be found in or near the same place in its congener ; 
and we look to find in the son every mental and moral prop- 
erty that existed in the ancestor. In race, it is not the broad 
shoulders, or litheness, or stature that give advantage, but 
a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit. Then the mir- 
acle and renown begin. Then first we care to examine the 
pedigree, and copy needfully the training, — what food they 
ate, what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which 
resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust 
wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and Roger 



RACE 351 

Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, 
Isaac Newton, William Shakspeare, George Chapman, 
Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to exist here? 
What made these delicate natures? was it the air? was it 
the sea? was it the parentage? For it is certain that these 
men are samples of their contemporaries. The hearing ear 
is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius 
can long or often utter anything which is not invited and 
gladly entertained by men around him. 

It is a race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of 
India under the dominion of a remote island in the north 
of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is al- 
leged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Prot- 
estants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the 
representative principle. Race is a controlling influence 
in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, 
has preserved the same character and employments. Race 
in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Can- 
ada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have 
held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus " on the 
Manners of the Germans," not long since, in Missouri, and 
the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resem- 
blance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and 
our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods. 

But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is 
resisted by other forces. Civilization is a reagent, and eats 
away the old traits. The Arabs of to-day are the Arabs 
of Pharaoh; but the Briton of to-day is a very different 
person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious sect 
has its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; 
the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will 
pick out a dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions 
carve their own lines on face and form. Certain circum- 
stances of English life are not less effective; as, personal 
liberty; plenty of food; good ale and mutton; open market, 
or good wages for every kind of labor; high bribes 
to talent and skill ; the island life, or the million oppor- 
tunities and outlets for expanding and misplaced talent; 
readiness of combination among themselves for politics or for 
business; strikes; and sense of superiority founded on habit 



352 ENGLISH TRAITS 

of victory in labor and in war; and the appetite for supe- 
riority grows by feeding. 

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. Cre- 
dence is a main element. 'Tis said that the views of nature 
held by any people determine all their institutions. What- 
ever influences add to mental or moral faculty take men out 
of nationality, as out of other conditions, and make the 
national life a culpable compromise. 

These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race sug- 
gest others which threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently 
based. The fixity or inconvertibleness of races as we see 
them is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail 
boundaries, since all our historical period is a point to the 
duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least and 
solitariest fact in our natural history, such as the melioration 
of fruits and of animal stocks, has the worth of a power 
in the opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover, though 
we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend 
of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and reso- 
lution of races, and strange resemblances meet us every- 
where. It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt 
and Roman, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see 
the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and 
know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some 
spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas. 

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, 
or a straight worm. As the scale mounts, the organizations 
become complex. We are piqued with pure descent, but 
nature loves inoculation. A child blends in his face the faces 
of both parents, and some feature from every ancestor whose 
face hangs on the wall. The best nations are those most 
widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide 
mixture, is the most potent advancer of nations. 

The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. 
Everything English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic 
elements. The language is mixed; the names of men are 
of different nations, — three languages, three or four nations ; 
— the currents of thought are counter: contemplation and 
practical skill ; active intellect and dead conservatism ; world- 
wide enterprise, and devoted use and wont; aggressive free- 






RACE 353 

dom and hospitable law, with bitter class-legislation ; a people 
scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the whole 
earth, and homesick to a man ; a country of extremes, — dukes 
and chartists, Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers ; 
nothing can be praised in it without damning exceptions, and 
nothing denounced without salvos of cordial praise. 

Neither do this people appear to be of one stem; but col- 
lectively a better race than any from which they are derived. 
Nor is it easy to trace it home to its original seats. Who can 
call by right names what races are in Britain? Who can 
trace them historically? Who can discriminate them an- 
atomically, or metaphysically? 

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the his- 
torical question of race, and, — come of whatever disputable 
ancestry, — the indisputable Englishman before me, himself 
very well marked, and nowhere else to be found, — I fancied 
I could leave quite aside the choice of a tribe as his lineal 
progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath, " the Englishman was 
the mud of all races." I incline to the belief that, as water, 
lime, and sand make mortar, so certain temperaments marry 
well, and, by well-managed contrarieties, develop as drastic 
a character as the English. On the whole, it is not so much 
a history of one or of certain tribes of Saxons, or Fris- 
ians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is 
an anthology of temperaments out of them all. Certain tem- 
peraments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight or ten or 
twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear trees, eight or 
ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive, whilst all the un-' 
adapted temperaments die out. 

The English derive their pedigree from such a range 
of nationalities, that there needs sea-room and land-room to 
unfold the varieties of talent and character. Perhaps the 
ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute acids at one 
pole, and alkalies at the other. So England tends to ac- 
cumulate her liberals in America, and her conservatives at 
London. The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every 
age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton 
in the blood hugs the homestead still. 

Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, 
what we think of when we talk of English traits really nar- 



354 ENGLISH TRAITS 

rows itself to a small district. It excludes Ireland, and Scot- 
land, and Wales, and reduces itself at last to London, that 
is, to those who come and go thither. The portraits that hang 
on the walls in the xAcademy Exhibition at London, the 
figures in Punch's drawings of the public men, or of the club- 
houses, the prints in the shop windows, are distinctive Eng- 
lish, and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish: but 'tis 
a very restricted nationality. As you go north into the manu- 
facturing and agricultural districts, and to the population 
that never travels, as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter 
Scotland, the world's Englishman is no longer found. In 
Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and 
manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the 
poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a coarse- 
ness of manners ; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity 
of dialectics. In Ireland are the same climate and soil as in 
England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political 
dependence, small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race. 

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may be well 
allowed, for there is no prosperity that seems more to depend 
on the kind of man than British prosperity. Only a hardy 
and wise people could have made this small territory great. 
We say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that if the boats are any- 
where nearly matched, it is the man that wins. Put the best 
sailing master into either boat, and he will win. 

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken tradi- 
tions, though vague, and losing themselves in fable. The 
traditions have got footing, and refused to be disturbed. The 
kitchen-clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We 
must use the popular category, as» we do by the Linmean 
classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. 
Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best- 
settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnolo- 
gist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe. 

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the ruddy 
complexion fair and plump, robust men, with faces cut like 
a die, and a strong island speech and accent ; a Norman type, 
with a complacency that belongs to that constitution. Others, 
who might be Americans, for anything that appeared in their 
complexion or form: and their speech was much less marked, 



RACE 355 

and their thought much less bound. We will call them Sax- 
ons. Then the Roman has implanted his dark complexion 
in the trinity or quaternity of bloods. 

i. The sources from which tradition derives their stock 
are mainly three. And, first, they are of the oldest blood 
of the world, — the Celtic. Some peoples are deciduous or 
transitory. Where are the Greeks? where the Etrurians? 
where the Romans? But the Celts or Sidonides are an old 
family, of whose beginning there is no memory, and their 
end is likely to be still more remote in the future; for they 
have endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain, 
and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems, 
and imitate the pure voices of nature. They are favorably 
remembered in the oldest records of Europe. They had no 
violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the land. 
They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, and a sub- 
lime creed. They have a hidden and precarious genius. 
They made the best popular literature of the Middle Ages in 
the songs of Merlin and the tender and delicious mythology 
of Arthur. 

2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom 
the Romans found hard to conquer in two hundred and ten 
years, — say, impossible to conquer, — when one remembers 
the long sequel; a people about whom, in the old empire, the 
rumor ran, there was never any that meddled with them that 
repented it not. 

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Narbonnese 
Gaul, looked out of a window, and saw a fleet of Northmen 
cruising in the Mediterranean. They even entered the port 
of the town where he was, causing no small alarm and sudden 
manning and arming of his galleys. As they put out to sea 
again, the emperor gazed long after them, his eyes bathed in 
tears. " I am tormented with sorrow," he said, " when I fore- 
see the evils they will bring on my posterity." There was 
reason for these Xerxes' tears. The men who have built a 
ship and invented the rig, — cordage, sail, compass, and pump, — 
the working in and out of port, have acquired much more 
than a ship. Now arm them, and every shore is at their 
mercy. For, if they have not numerical superiority where 



356 ENGLISH TRAITS 

they anchor they have only to sail a mile or two to find it. 
Bonaparte's art of war, namely of concentrating force on the 
point of attack, must always be theirs who have the choice 
of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the fight 
from a higher ground of power than the land-nations; and 
can engage them on shore with a victorious advantage in the 
retreat. As soon as the shores are sufficiently peopled to 
make piracy a losing business, the same skill and courage 
are ready for the sendee of trade. 

The Heimskringla, 2 or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, 
collected by Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of 
English history. Its portraits, like Homer's, are strongly 
individualized. The Sagas describe a monarchical republic 
like Sparta. The government disappears before the impor- 
tance of citizens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight and 
perish to aggrandize a king, but the actors are bonders or 
landholders, every one of whom is named and personally and 
patronymically described, as the king's friend and companion. 
A sparse population gives this high worth to every man. 
Individuals are often noticed as very handsome persons, which 
trait only brings the story nearer to the English race. Then 
the solid material interest predominates, so dear to English 
understanding, wherein the association is logical, between 
merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas are not the knights 
of South Europe. No vaporing of France and Spain has 
corrupted them. They are substantial farmers, whom the 
rough times have forced to defend their properties. They 
have weapons which they use in a determined manner, by 
no means for chivalry, but for their acres. They are people 
considerably advanced in rural arts, living amphibiously on 
a rough coast, and drawing half their food from the sea, 
and half from the land. They have herds of cows, and malt, 
wheat, bacon, butter, and cheese. They fish in the fiord, and 
hunt the deer. A king among these farmers has a varying 
power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of a sheriff. 
A king was maintained much as, in some of our country dis- 
tricts, a winter schoolmaster is quartered, a week here, a week 
there, and a fortnight on the next farm, — on all the farmers 
in rotation. This the king calls going into guest-quarters; 

? Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. London, 1844. 



RACE 357 

and it was the only way in which, in a poor country, a poor 
king, with many retainers, could be kept alive, when he leaves 
his own farm to collect his dues through the kingdom. 

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with 
good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But 
they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end of 
man is to murder, or to be murdered ; oars, scythes, harpoons, 
crowbars, peatknives, and hayforks are tools valued by them 
all the more for their charming aptitude for assassinations. 
A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert themselves by thrust- 
ing each his sword through the other's body, as did Yngve 
and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, 
and, finding no weapon near, will take the bits out of their 
horses' mouths, and crush each other's heads with them, as 
did Alric and Eric. The sight of a tent-cord or a cloak- 
string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or a husband, 
or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so much as a hay- 
fork, he sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it 
vastly amusing to burn up half a dozen kings in a hall, after 
getting them drunk. Never was poor gentleman so sur- 
feited with life, so furious to be rid of it, as the Northman. 
If he cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get himself com- 
fortably gored by a bull's horns, like Egil, or slain by a land- 
slide, like the agricultural King Onund. Odin died in his bed, 
in Sweden; but it was a proverb of ill condition, to die the 
death of old age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes 
in battle, as long as he can stand, then orders his war-ship, 
loaded with his dead men and their weapons, to be taken out 
to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails spread; being left 
alone, he sets fire to some tarwpod, and lies down contented 
on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship flew burning 
in clear flame, out between the islets into the ocean, and 
there was the right end of King Hake. 

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later 
are of a noble strain. History rarely yields us better pas- 
sages than the conversation between King Sigurd the Cru- 
sader and King Eystein, his brother, on their respective 
merits, — one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of the arts 
of peace. 

But the reader of the Norman history must steel himself 

w hc v 



i 



358 ENGLISH TRAITS 

by holding fast the remote compensations which result from 
animal vigor. As the old fossil world shows that the first 
steps of reducing the chaos were confided to saurians and 
other huge and horrible animals, so the foundations of the 
new civility were to be laid by the most savage men. 

The Normans came out of France into England worse men 
than they went into it, one hundred and sixty years before. 
They had lost their own language, and learned the Romance 
or barbarous Latin of the Gauls; and had acquired, with the 
language, all the vices it had names for. The conquest has 
obtained in the chronicles the name of the "memory of sor- 
row." Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These 
founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious 
dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were 
all alike, they took everything they could carry, they burned, 
harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything En- 
glish was wrought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is 
the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified 
men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, 
who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by 
assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, 
wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled. 

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth 
and eleventh centuries, and was the receptacle into which all 
the mettle of that strenuous population was poured. The con- 
tinued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden, and Den- 
mark to these piratical expeditions, exhausted those countries, 
like a tree which bears much fruit when young, and these 
have been second-rate powers ever since. The power of 
the race migrated, and left Norway void. King Olaf said, 
" When King Harold, my father, went westward to England, 
the chosen men in Norway followed him : but Norway was so 
emptied then, that such men have not since been to find in 
the country, nor especially such a leader as King Harold was 
for wisdom and bravery." 

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, 
the British government sent Nelson to bombard the Danish 
forts in the Sound; and, in 1807, Lord Cathcart, at Copen- 
hagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it lay in the basins, and 
all the equipments from the Arsenal, and carried them to 



RACE 359 

England. Konghelle, the town where the kings of Norway, 
Sweden, and Denmark were wont to meet, is now rented 
to a private English gentleman for a hunting ground. 

It took many generations to trim, and comb, and perfume 
the first boat-load of Norse pirates into royal highnesses and 
most noble Knights of the Garter : but every sparkle of orna- 
ment dates back to the Norse boat. There will be time 
enough to mellow this strength into civility and religion. 
It is a medical fact that the children of the blind see; the 
children of felons have a healthy conscience. Many a mean, 
dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty, transformed in a 
serious and generous youth. 

The mildness of the following ages has not quite effaced 
these traits of Odin; as the rudiment of a structure matured 
in the tiger is said to be still found unabsorbed in the Cau- 
casian man. The nation has a tough, acrid, animal nature, 
which centuries of churching and civilizing have not been able 
to sweeten. Alfieri said, " The crimes of Italy were the proof 
of the superiority of the^ stock;" and one may say of England 
that this watch moves on a splinter of adamant. The En- 
glish uncultured are a brutal nation. The crimes recorded 
in their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way 
of cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a fair stand- 
up fight. The brutality of the manners in the lower class 
appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of 
executions, and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, 
delightful to the English of all classes. The costennongers 
of London streets hold cowardice in loathing: — "We must 
work our fists well; we are all handy with our fists." The 
public schools are charged with being bear-gardens of brutal 
strength, and are liked by the people for that cause. 
The fagging is a trait of the same quality. Medwin, in the 
Life of Shelley, relates that, at a military school, they rolled 
up a young man in a snowball, and left him so in his room, 
while the other cadets went to church; — and crippled him 
for life. They have retained impressment, deck-flogging, 
army-flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity of 
the army discipline, that a soldier sentenced to flogging, 
sometimes prays that his sentence may be commuted to death. 
Flogging banished from the armies of Western Europe, re- 



360 ENGLISH TRAITS 

mains here by the sanction of the Duke of Wellington. The 
right of the husband to sell the wife has been retained down to 
our times. The Jews have been the favorite victims of royal 
and popular persecution. Henry III. mortgaged all the Jews 
in the kingdom to his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, as 
security for money which he borrowed. The torture of crimi- 
nals, and the rack for extorting evidence, were slowly dis- 
used. Of the criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Romilly said, 
" I have examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the 
worst, and worthy of the Anthropophagi." In the last ses- 
sion, the House of Commons was listening to details of flog- 
ging and torture practised in the jails. 

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a 
hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the sailors 
and factors of the globe. From childhood, they dabbled in 
water, they swum like fishes, their playthings were boats. 
In the case of the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, 
that " England being an island, the very midland shires there- 
in are all to be accounted maritime;" and Fuller adds, "the 
genius even of landlocked counties driving the natives with 
a maritime dexterity." As early as the conquest, it is re- 
marked in explanation of the wealth of England, that its 
merchants trade to all countries. 

The English, at the present day, have great vigor of body 
and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and under- 
sized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger men than 
the Americans. I suppose a hundred English taken at ran- 
dom out of the street, would weigh a fourth more than so 
many Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger. 
They are round, ruddy and handsome ; at least, the whole 
bust is well formed; and there is a tendency to stout and 
powerful frames. I remarked the stoutness, on my first land- 
ing at Liverpool ; porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — what 
substantial, respectable, grandfatherly figures, with costume 
and manners to suit. The American has arrived at the old 
mansion-house, and finds himself among uncles, aunts, and 
grandsires. The pictures on the chimney-tiles of his nursery 
were pictures of these people. Here they are in the identical 
costumes and air which so took him. 

It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, and the 



RACE 361 

women have that disadvantage,— few tall, slender figures 
of flowing shapes, but stunted and thickset persons. The 
French say that the English women have two left hands. 
But, in all ages, they are a handsome race. The bronze monu- 
ments of crusaders lying cross-legged, in the Temple Church 
at London, and those in Worcester and in Salisbury Cathe- 
drals, which are seven hundred years old, are of the same 
type as the best youthful heads of men now in England; — 
please by beauty of the same character, an expression blend- 
ing good nature, valor, and refinement, and, mainly, by that 
uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily seen 
in the streets of London. 

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distinguished 
for beauty. The anecdote of the handsome captives which 
Saint Gregory found at Rome, a. d. 600, is matched by the 
testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five centuries later, 
who wondered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the 
young English captives. Meantime, the Heimskringla has 
frequent occasion to speak of the personal beauty of its 
heroes. When it is considered what humanity, what re- 
sources of mental and moral power, the traits of the blond 
race betoken, — its accession to empire marks a new and finer 
epoch, wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated at 
last by humanity, and shall plough in its furrow henceforward. 
It is not a final race, once a crab always a crab, but a race 
with a future. 

On the English face are combined decision and nerve, with 
the fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. 
Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility, the fine per- 
ception, and poetic construction. The fair Saxon man, with 
open front, and honest meaning, domestic, affectionate, is 
not the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin 
is made, but he is moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, 
marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges, churches, 
charities, and colonies. 

They are rather manly than warlike. When the war is 
over, the mask falls from the affectionate and domestic tastes, 
which make them women in kindness. This union of qualities 
is fabled in their national legend of Beauty and the Beast, or 
long before, in the Greek legend of Hermaphrodite. The two 



362 ENGLISH TRAITS 

sexes are co-present in the English mind. I apply to Britan- 
nia, queen of seas and colonies, the words in which her latest 
novelist portrays his heroine : " She is as mild as she is game, 
and as game as she is mild." The English delight in the 
antagonism which combines in one person the extremes of 
courage and tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends 
his love to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent school- 
boy that goes to bed, says, " Kiss me, Hardy," and turns to 
sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the 
most affectionate and domestic. Admiral Rodney's figure 
approached to delicacy and effeminacy, and he declared him- 
self very sensible to fear, which he surmounted only by con- 
siderations of honor and public duty. Clarendon says, the 
Duke of Buckingham was so modest and gentle, that some 
courtiers attempted to put affronts on him, until they found 
that this modesty and effeminacy was only a mask for the 
most terrible determination. And Sir James Parry said, the 
other day, of Sir John Franklin, that, " if he found Welling- 
ton Sound open, he explored it; for he was a man who never 
turned his back on a danger, yet of that tenderness, that he 
would not brush away a mosquito." Even for their highway- 
men the same virtue is claimed, and Robin Hood comes de- 
scribed to us as mitissimits prcsdonum, the gentlest thief. But 
they know where their wardogs lie. Cromwell, Blake, Marl- 
borough, Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington are not to be 
trifled with, and the brutal strength which lies at the bottom 
of society, the animal ferocity of the quays and cockpits, the 
bullies of the costermongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and 
Spitalfields, they know how to wake up. 

They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle and 
old age. The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. 
A clear skin, a peachbloom complexion, and good teeth are 
found all over the island. They use a plentiful and nutritious 
diet. The operative cannot subsist on water-cresses. Beef, 
mutton, wheatbread, and malt-liquors are universal among the 
first-class laborers. Good feeding is a chief point of national 
pride among the vulgar, and, in their caricatures, they repre- 
sent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body. It is curious 
that Tacitus found the English beer already in use among the 
Germans : " They make from barley or wheat a drink cor- 



RACE 363 

rupted into some resemblance to wine." Lord Chief Justice 
Fortescue, in Henry VI. 's time, says, " The inhabitants of 
England drink no water, unless at certain times, on a religious 
score, and by way of penance." The extremes of poverty and 
ascetic penance, it would seem, never reach cold water in Eng- 
land. Wood, the antiquary, in describing the poverty and 
maceration of Father Lacey, an English Jesuit, does not deny 
him beer. He says, " His bed was under a thatching, and 
the way to it up a ladder; his fare was coarse; his drink, 
of a penny a gawn, or gallon." 

They have more constitutional energy than any other 
people. They think, with Henri Quatre, that manly exercises 
are the foundation of that elevation of mind which gives 
one nature ascendant over another; or, with the Arabs, that 
the days spent in the chase are not counted in the length of 
life. They box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole. 
They eat, and drink, and live jolly in the open air, putting a bar 
of solid sleep between day and day. They walk and ride 
as fast as they can, their head bent forward, as if urged on 
some pressing affair. The French say that Englishmen in 
the street always walk straight before them, like mad dogs. 
Men and women walk with infatuation. As soon as he can 
handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of every Englishman 
of condition. They are the most voracious people of prey that 
ever existed. Every season turns out the aristocracy into 
the country, to shoot and fish. The more vigorous run out of 
the island to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa, and 
Australia, to hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon, 
by lasso ; with dog, with horse, with elephant, or with drome- 
dary, all the game that is in nature. These men have written 
the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope, Murray, 
Herbert, Maxwell, Cumming, and a host of travellers. The 
people at home are addicted to boxing, running, leaping, and 1 
rowing matches. 

I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the fact 
that the men have muscles almost as tough and supple as their 
own. If in every efficient man there is first a fine animal, in 
the English race it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, 
broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good cheer, and 
a little overloaded by his flesh. Men of animal nature rely, 



364 ENGLISH TRAITS 

like animals, on their instincts. The Englishman associates 
well with dogs and horses. His attachment to the horse 
arises from the courage and address required to manage it. 
The horse finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise 
its opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians 
like the company of horses better than the company of pro- 
fessors. I suppose the horses are better company for them. 
The horse has more uses than Buffon noted. If you go into 
the streets, every driver in 'bus or dray is a bully, and, if I 
wanted a good troop of soldiers I should recruit among the 
stables. Add a certain degree of refinement to the vivacity 
of these riders, and you obtain the precise quality which 
makes the men and women of polite society formidable. 

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with Hengst 
and Horsa for their Saxon founders. The other branch of 
their race had been Tartar nomads. The horse was all 
their wealth. The children were fed on mares' milk. The 
pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the tenacious 
practice of the Norsemen to eat horseflesh at religious feasts. 
In the Danish invasions, the marauders seized upon horses 
where they landed, and were at once converted into a body 
of expert cavalry. 

At one time this skill seems to have declined. Two cen- 
turies ago the English horse never performed any eminent 
service beyond the seas; and the reason assigned was that 
the genius of the English hath always more inclined them to 
foot-service, as pure and proper manhood, without any 
mixture; whilst, in a victory on horseback, the credit ought 
to be divided betwixt the man and his horse. But in two 
hundred years a change has taken place. Now, they boast 
that they understand horses better than any people in the 
world, and that their horses are become their second selves. 

" William the Conqueror being," says Camden, " better af- 
fected to beasts than to men, imposed heavy fines and punish- 
ments on those that should meddle with his game." The 
Saxon Chronicle says, " He loved the tall deer as if he were 
their father." And rich Englishmen have followed his ex- 
ample, according to their ability, ever since, in encroaching 
on the tillage and commons with their game-preserves. It 
is a proverb in England that it is safer to shoot a man than 



ABILITY 365 

a hare. The severity of the game-laws certainly indicates 
an extravagant sympathy of the nation with horses and 
hunters. The gentlemen are always on horseback, and have 
brought horses to an ideal perfection, — the English racer is 
a factitious breed. A score or two of mounted gentlemen 
may frequently be seen running like centaurs down a hill 
nearly as steep as the roof of a house. Every inn-room is 
lined with pictures of races; telegraphs communicate, every 
hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot: and 
the House of Commons adjourns over the "Derby Day." 



CHAPTER V 

ABILITY 

The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians. 
History does not allow us to fix the limits of the application 
of these names with any accuracy; but from the residence 
of a portion of these people in France, and from some effect 
of that powerful soil on their blood and manners, the Nor- 
man has come popularly to represent in England the aristo- 
cratic, — and the Saxon the democratic principle. And though, 
I doubt not, the nobles are of both tribes, and the workers 
of both, yet we are forced to use the names a little mythically, 
one to represent the worker, and the other the en j oyer. 

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the domi- 
nant races tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician, the Celt, 
and the Goth had already got in. The Roman came, but in 
the very day when his fortune culminated. He looked in the 
eyes of a new people that was to supplant his own. He 
disembarked his legions, erected his camps and towers, — 
presently he heard bad news from Italy, and worse and worse, 
every year ; at last, he made a handsome compliment of roads 
and walls, and departed. But the Saxon seriously settled 
in the land, builded, tilled, fished, and traded, with German 
truth and adhesiveness. The Dane came, and divided with 
him. Last of all, the Norman, or French-Dane, arrived, and 
formally conquered, harried, and ruled the kingdom. A cen- 
tury later, it came out that the Saxon had the most bottom 



366 ENGLISH TRAITS 

and longevity, had managed to make the victor speak the 
language and accept the law and usage of the victim ; forced 
the baron to dictate Saxon terms to Norman kings ; and, step 
by step, got all the essential securities of civil liberty in- 
vented and confirmed. The genius of the race and the genius 
of the place conspired to this effect. The island is lucrative 
to free labor, but not worth possession on other terms. The 
race was so intellectual, that a feudal or military tenure could 
not last longer than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes 
so thoroughly beaten in the war that the name of English and 
villein were synonymous, yet so vivacious as to extort charters 
from the kings, stood on the strong personality of these 
people. Sense and economy must rule in a world which is 
made of sense and economy, and the banker, with his seven 
per cent, drives the earl out of his castle. A nobility of 
soldiers cannot keep down a commonalty of shrewd scientific 
persons. What signifies a pedigree of a hundred links, 
against a cotton-spinner with steam in his mill ; or, against 
a company of broad-shouldered Liverpool merchants, for 
whom Stephenson and Brunei are contriving locomotives and 
a tubular bridge? 

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have the 
taste for toil, a distaste for pleasure or repose, and the tele- 
scopic appreciation of distant gain. They are the wealth- 
makers, — and by dint of mental faculty, which has its own 
conditions. The Saxon works after liking, or, only for him- 
self ; and to set him at work, and to begin to draw his mon- 
strous values out of barren Britain, all dishonor, fret, and 
barrier must be removed, and then his energies begin to 
play. 

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls, — 
a kind of goblin men, with vast power of work and skilful 
production, — divine stevedores, carpenters, reapers, smiths, 
and masons, swift to reward every kindness done them, with 
gifts of gold and silver. In all English history, this dream 
comes to pass. Certain Trolls or working brains, under the 
names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton, Camden, Drake, 
Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, Brindley, Watt, Wedg- 
wood, dwell in the troll-mounts of Britain, and turn the 
sweat of their face to power and renown. 



i : 



ABILITY 367 

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed on this 
spellbound island with impunity. The enchantments of bar- 
ren shingle and rough weather transformed every adventurer 
into a laborer. Each vagabond that arrived bent his neck to 
the yoke of gain, or found the air too tense for him. The 
strong survived, the weaker went to the ground. Even the 
pleasure-hunters and sots of England are of a tougher texture. 
A hard temperature had been formed by Saxon and Saxon- 
Dane, and such of these French or Normans as could reach 
it were naturalized in every sense. 

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in Eng- 
land must be looked at as growths or irresistible offshoots 
of the expanding mind of the race. A man of that brain 
thinks and acts thus; and his neighbor, being afflicted with 
the same kind of brain, though he is rich, and called a baron, 
or a duke, thinks the same thing, and is ready to allow the 
justice of the thought and act in his retainer or tenant, 
though sorely against his baronial or ducal will. 

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of mas- 
tiffs, so fierce that, when their teeth were set, you must cut 
their heads off to part them. The man was like his dog. 
The people have that nervous bilious temperament, which is 
known by medical men to resist every means employed to 
make its possessor subservient to the will of others. The 
English game is main force to main force, the planting of 
foot to foot, fair play and open field, — a rough tug without 
trick or dodging, till one or both come to pieces. King 
Ethelwald spoke the language of his race, when he planted 
himself at Wimborne, and said, "he would do one of two 
things, or there live, or there lie." They hate craft and sub- 
tlety. They neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate ; 
and when they have pounded each other to a poultice, they 
will shake hands and be friends for the remainder of their 
lives. 

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at country 
fairs, at the hustings, and in Parliament. No artifice, no 
breach of truth and plain dealing, — not so much as secret 
ballot, is suffered in the island. In Parliament, the tactics 
of the opposition is to resist every step of the government, 
by a pitiless attack: and in a bargain, no prospect of advan- 



368 ENGLISH TRAITS 

tage is so dear to the merchant, as the thought of being 
tricked is mortifying. 

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and James who 
won the sea-fight of Scanderoon, was a model Englishman 
in his day. " His person was handsome and gigantic, he 
had so graceful elocution and noble address that, had he 
been dropt out of the clouds in any part of the world, 
he would have made himself respected: he was skilled in six 
tongues, and master of arts and arms." 1 Sir Kenelm wrote 
a book, " Of Bodies and of Souls," in which he propounds that 
" Syllogisms do breed or rather are all the variety of man's 
life. They are the steps by which we walk in all our busi- 
nesses. Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such 
chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving from this work, he 
doth as deficient from the nature of man : and, if he do aught 
beyond this, by breaking out into divers sorts of exterior 
actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked sequel of simple |f 
discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, the bounds, and the 
model of it." 2 

There spoke the genius of the English people. There is i 
a necessity on them to be logical. They would hardly greet 
the good that did not logically fall, — as if it excluded their 
own merit, or shook their understandings. They are jealous jj 
of minds that have much facility of association, from an in- '( 
stinctive fear that the seeing many relations to their thought j 
might impair this serial continuity and lucrative concentra- j- 
tion. They are impatient of genius, or of minds addicted to i 
contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies j 
of thought, however lawful, whose steps they cannot count [i 
by their wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syl- it 
logism that ends in syllogism. For they have a supreme eye 
to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer 
to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, carpenters, and chem- 
ists, following the sequence of nature, and one on which 
words make no impression. Their mind is not dazzled by its 
own means, but locked and bolted to results. They love men 
who, like Samuel Johnson, a doctor in the schools, would |l 
jump out of his syllogism the instant his major proposition 
was in danger, to save that, at all hazards. The practical 

1 Antony Wood. a Man's Soule, p. 29. 



ABILITY 369 

vision is spacious, and they can hold many threads without 
entangling them. All the steps they orderly take; but with 
the high logic of never confounding the minor and major 
proposition; keeping their eye on their aim, in all the com- 
plicity and delay incident to the several series of means they 
employ. There is room in their minds for this and that, — 
a science of degrees. In the courts, the independence of the 
judges and the loyalty of the suitors are equally excellent. 
In Parliament, they have hit on that capital invention of 
freedom, a constitutional opposition. And when courts and 
Parliament are both deaf, the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, 
patient, his weapon of defence from year to year is the obsti- 
nate reproduction of the grievance with calculations and esti- 
mates. But, meantime, he is drawing numbers and money to 
his opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails, right of revolution 
is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are bound to see 
their measure carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat. 

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice 
enters, not so apparent in other races, — a belief in the exist- 
ence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play. There 
is on every question an appeal from the assertion of the 
parties to the proof of what is asserted. They are impious 
in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust before a fact. 
Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer in the ring, is 
it a candidate on the hustings, — the universe of Englishmen 
will suspend their judgment until the trial can be had. They 
are not to be led by a phrase, they want a working plan, a 
working machine, a working constitution, and will sit out 
the trial, and abide by the issue, and reject all preconceived 
theories. In politics they put blunt questions, which must be 
answered; who is to pay the taxes? what will you do for 
trade? what for corn? what for the spinner? 

This singular fairness and its results strike the French with 
surprise. Philip de Commines says, " Now, in my opinion, 
among all the sovereignties I know in the world, that in 
which the public good is best attended to, and the least vio- 
lence exercised on the people, is that of England." Life is 
safe, and personal rights; and what is freedom, without 
security ? whilst, in France, " fraternity," " equality," and 
" indivisible unity," are names for assassination. Montesquieu 



370 ENGLISH TRAITS 

said, " England is the freest country in the world. If a man 
in England had as many enemies as hairs on his head, no 
harm would happen to him." 

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their real- 
istic logic or coupling of means to ends, have given them the 
leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu said, " No 
people have true common sense but those who are born in 
England." This common sense is a perception of all the con- 
ditions of our earthly existence, of laws that can be stated, 
and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only 
by practice, in which allowance for friction is made. They 
are impious in their scepticism of theory, and in high depart- 
ments they are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional, 
surrender to facts, and the choice of means to reach their 
ends, are as admirable as with ants and bees. 

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love 
the lever, the screw, and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, 
the water- fall, wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and the wind 
to bear their freight ships. More than the diamond Koh-i- 
noor, which glitters among their crown jewels, they prize 
that dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn 
themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is par- 
allel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and 
galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at 
the coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron- 
masters, colliers, wool-combers, and tanners in Europe. They 
apply themselves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting en- 
croachments of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold and wet sub- 
soil; to fishery, to manufacture of indispensable staples, — 
salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery, and brick, — to 
bees and silkworms; — and by their steady combinations they 
succeed. A manufacturer sits down to dinner in a suit of 
clothes which was wool on a sheep's back at sunrise. You 
dine with a gentleman on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, 
poultry, mushrooms, and pine-apples, all the growth of his 
estate. They are neat husbands for ordering all their tools 
pertaining to house and field. All are well kept. There is 
no want and no waste. They study use and fitness in their 
building, in the order of their dwellings, and in their dress. 
The Frenchman invented the ruffle, the Englishman added 



ABILITY 371 

the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat buttoned 
to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting texture. If he is 
a lord, he dresses a little worse than a commoner. They 
have diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes, and 
coats through Europe. They think him the best dressed man, 
whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot, notice or 
remember to describe it. 

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts, and 
manufactures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its shape, 
thought and long experience of workmen. They put the 
expense in the right place, as, in their sea-steamers, in the 
solidity of the machinery and the strength of the boat. The 
admirable equipment of their arctic ships carries London to 
the pole. They build roads, aqueducts, warm and ventilate 
houses. And they have impressed their directness and prac- 
tical habit on modern civiliatzion. 

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks who 
ought not to break; and that, if he do not make trade every- 
thing, it will make him nothing ; and acts on this belief. The 
spirit of system, attention to details, and the subordination 
of details, or the not driving things too finely (which is 
charged on the Germans), constitute that despatch of busi- 
ness which makes the mercantile power of England. 

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of the 
opinion of Civilis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus re- 
ports as holding " that the gods are on the side of the strong- 
est;" — a sentence which Bonaparte unconsciously translated, 
when he said, " that he had noticed, that Providence always 
favored the heaviest battalion." Their military science pro- 
pounds that if the weight of the advancing column is greater 
than that of the resisting, the latter is destroyed. Therefore 
Wellington, when he came to the army in Spain, had every 
man weighed, first with accoutrements, and then without ; be- 
lieving that the force of an army depended on the weight and 
power of the individual soldiers, in spite of cannon. Lord 
Palmerston told the House of Commons that more care is 
taken of the health and comfort of English troops than of 
any other troops in the world, and that hence the English 
can put more men into the rank, on the day of action, on the 
field of battle, than any other army. Before the bombard- 



372 ENGLISH TRAITS 

ment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day 
after day, himself in the boats, on the exhausting service 
of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's celebrated ma- 
noeuvre of breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson's feat 
of doubling, or stationing his ships one on the outer bow, 
and another on the outer quarter of each of the enemy's, 
were only translations into naval tactics of Bonaparte's rule 
of concentration. Lord Collingwood was accustomed to tell 
his men that, if they could fire three well-directed broadsides 
in five minutes, no vessel could resist them; and, from 
constant practice, they came to do it in three minutes and 
a half. 

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely 
most on the simplest means; and do not like ponderous and 
difficult tactics, but delight to bring the affair hand to hand, 
where the victory lies with the strength, courage, and endur- 
ance of the individual combatants. They adopt every im- 
provement in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they funda- 
mentally believe that the best stratagem in naval war is to lay 
your ship close alongside of the enemy's ship, and bring all 
your guns to bear on him, until you or he go to the bottom. 
This is the old fashion, which never goes out of fashion, 
neither in nor out of England. 

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sentiment, 
and never any whim that they will shed their blood for; but 
usually property, and right measured by property, that breeds 
revolution. They have no Indian taste for a tomahawk- 
dance, no French taste for a badge or a proclamation. The 
Englishman is peaceably minding his business, and earning 
his day's wages. But if you offer to lay hand on his day's 
wages, on his cow, or his right in common, or his shop, he 
will fight to the Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, habeas- 
corpus, star-chamber, ship-money, Popery, Plymouth-colony, 
American Revolution, are all questions involving a yeoman's 
right to his dinner, and, except as touching that, would not 
have lashed the British nation to rage and revolt. 

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order, and of 
calculation, it must be owned they are capable of larger 
views; but the indulgence is expensive to them, cost great 
crises, or accumulations of mental power. In common the 






ABILITY 373 

horse works best with blinders. Nothing is more in the line 
of English thought, than our unvarnished Connecticut ques- 
tion, " Pray, sir, how do you get your living when you are 
at home?" — The questions of freedom, of taxation, of privi- 
lege, are money questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer 
and fleshpots, they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. 
Their drowsy minds need to be flagellated by war and trade 
and politics and persecution. They cannot well read a prin- 
ciple, except by the light of fagots and of burning towns. 

Tacitus says of the Germans, " Powerful only in sudden 
efforts, they are impatient of toil and labor." This highly 
destined race, if it had not somewhere added the chamber 
of patience to its brain, would not have built London. I 
know not from which of the tribes and temperaments that 
went to the composition of the people this tenacity was sup- 
plied, but they clinch every nail they drive. They had no run- 
ning for luck, and no immoderate speed. They spend largely 
on their fabric, and await the slow return. Their leather lies 
tanning seven years in the vat. At Rogers's mills, in Shef- 
field, where I was shown the process of making a razor and 
a penknife, I was told there is no luck in making good steel; 
that they make no mistakes, every blade in the hundred and 
in the thousand is good. And that is charactistic of all 
their work, — no more is attempted than is done. 

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he is told 
that " nobody is permitted to remain here, unless he under- 
stand some art, and excel in it all other men." The same ques- 
tion is still put to the posterity of Thor. A nation of labor- 
ers, every man is trained to some one art or detail, and aims 
at perfection in that; not content unless he has something 
in which he thinks he surpasses all other men. He would 
rather not do anything at all, than not do it well. I suppose 
no people have such thoroughness; — from the highest to the 
lowest, every man meaning to be master of his art. 

H To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the end 
of a speech in debate : " No," said an Englishman, " but to 
set your shoulder at the wheel, — to advance the business." 
Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak in popular assemblies, 
confining himself to the House of Commons, where a meas- 
ure can be carried by a speech. The business of the House 

x hc v 



374 ENGLISH TRAITS 

of Commons is conducted by a few persons, but these are 
hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel " knew the Blue Books by 
heart." His colleagues and rivals carry Hansard in their 
heads. The high civil and legal offices are not beds of ease, 
but posts which exact frightful amounts of mental labor. 
Many of our great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, 
Romilly, are soon worked to death. They are excellent 
judges in England of a good worker, and when they find one 
like Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry, 
Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or 
Russell, there is nothing too good or too high for him. 

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public aim. 
Private persons "exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian re- 
searches, the same pertinacity as the nation showed in the 
coalitions in which it yoked Europe against the empire 
of Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, and still renewed, 
until the sixth hurled him from his seat. 

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his 
father, who had made the catalogue of the stars of the 
northern hemisphere, expatriated himself for years at the 
Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern 
heaven, came home, and redacted it in eight years more; — 
a work whose value does not begin until thirty years have 
elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages of the highest 
import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic expeditions year 
after year, in search of Sir John Franklin, until, at last, 
they have threaded their way through polar pack and Beh- 
ring's Straits, and solved the geographical problem. Lord 
Elgin, at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek re- 
mains, set up his scaffoldings, in spite of epigrams, and, 
after five years' labor to collect them, got his marbles on ship- 
board. The ship struck a rock, and went to the bottom. 
He had them all fished up, by divers, at a vast expense, and 
brought to London ; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and 
Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were to be his 
applauders. In the same spirit were the excavation and 
research by Sir Charles Fellowes, for the Xanthian monu- 
ment ; and of Layard, for his Nineveh sculptures. 

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a 
London extended into every man's mind, though he live 






ABILITY 375 

in Van Dieman's Land or Capetown. Faithful performance 
of what is undertaken to be performed, they honor in them- 
selves, and exact in others, as certificate of equality with 
themselves. The modern world is theirs. They have made and 
make it day by day. The commercial relations of the world 
are so intimately drawn to London, that every ■ dollar on 
earth contributes to the strength of the English government. 
And if all the wealth in the planet should perish by war or 
deluge, they know themselves competent to replace it. 

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-going 
qualities; their descent from Odin's smiths, by their hered- 
itary skill in working in iron; their British birth, by hus- 
bandry and immense wheat harvests; and justified their oc- 
cupancy of the centre of habitable land, by their supreme 
ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, builded, 
forged, spun, and woven. They have made the island a 
thoroughfare ; and London a shop, a law-court, a record-office, 
and scientific bureau, inviting to strangers; a sanctuary to 
refugees of every political and religious opinion; and such 
a city, that almost every active man, in any nation, finds him- 
self, at one time or other, forced to visit it. 

In every path of practical activity, they have gone even 
with the best. There is no secret of war, in which they 
have not shown mastery. The steam-chamber of Watt, the 
locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts, per- 
form the labor of the world. There is no department of 
literature, of science, or of useful art, in which they have not 
produced a first-rate book. It is England, whose opinion 
is waited for on the merit of a new invention, an improved 
science. And in the complications of the trade and politics 
of their vast empire, they have been equal to every ex- 
igency, with counsel and with conduct. Is it their luck, 
or is it in the chambers of their brain, — it is their com- 
mercial advantage, that whatever light appears in better 
method or happy invention, breaks out in their race. They 
are a family to which a destiny attaches, and the Banshee 
has sworn that a male heir shall never be wanting. They 
have a wealth of men to fill important posts, and the vigilance 
of party criticism insures the selection of a competent 
person. 



376 ENGLISH TRAITS 

A proof of the energy of the British people, is the highly- 
artificial construction of the whole fabric. The climate and 
geography, I said, were factitious, as if the hands of man 
had arranged the conditions. The same character pervades 
the whole kingdom. Bacon said, " Rome was a state not 
subject to paradoxes;" but England subsists by antagonisms 
and contradictions. The foundations of its greatness are 
the rolling waves; and, from first to last, it is a museum of 
anomalies. This foggy and rainy country furnishes the 
world with astronomical observations. Its short rivers do 
not afford water-power, but the land shakes under the thunder 
of the mills. There is no gold mine of any importance, but 
there is more gold in England than in all other countries. 
It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the wines 
of all countries are in its docks. The French Comte de Lau- 
raguais said, " No fruit ripens in England but a baked 
apple;" but oranges and pine-apples are as cheap in London 
as in the Mediterranean. The < Mark-Lane Express or the 
Custom House Returns bear out to the letter the vaunt of 
Pope, 

" L#et India boast her palms, nor envy we 
The weeping amber nor the spicy tree, 
While, by our oaks those precious loads are borne, 
And realms commanded which those trees adorn." 

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of 
artificial breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep 
and cows and horses to order, and breeds in which every- 
thing was omitted but what is economical. The cow is sacri- 
ficed to her bag., the ox to his sirloin. Stall-feeding makes 
sperm-mills of the cattle, and converts the stable to a chemical 
factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds, too much fished, or 
obstructed by factories, are artificially filled with the eggs 
of salmon, turbot, and herring. 

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridge- 
shire are unhealthy and too barren to pay rent. By cylin- 
drical tiles, and guttapercha tubes, five millions of acres 
of bad land have been drained and put on equality with the 
best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate too, which 
was already believed to have become milder and drier by the 
enormous consumption of coal, is so far reached by this 



ABILITY 377 

new action, that fogs and storms are said to disappear. 
In due course, all England will be drained, and rise a second 
time out of the waters. The latest step was to call in the 
aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is almost an Englishman. 
I do not know but they will send him to Parliament next, 
to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans, and 
now he must pump, grind, dig, and plough for the farmer. 
The markets created by the manufacturing population have 
erected agriculture into a great thriving and spending in- 
dustry. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to the 
value of the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper 
than the natural resources. No man can afford to walk, 
when the parliamentary-train carries him for a penny a mile. 
Gas-burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless floors 
in the cities. All the houses in London buy their water. 
The English trade does not exist for the exportation of 
native products, but on its manufactures, or the making 
well everything which is ill made elsewhere. They make 
ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas for the Hindoo, 
ginseng for the Chinese, beads for the Indian, laces for 
the Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for 
kings. 

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and 
Italy to be placed within the reach of every manufacturing 
population. They caused to be translated from foreign lan- 
guages and illustrated by elaborate drawings, the most 
approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris.They 
have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a grace 
to the products of their looms, their potteries, and their 
foundries. 3 

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social 
system. Their law is a network of fictions. Their property, 
a scrip or certificate of right to interest on money that no 
man ever saw. Their social classes are made by statute. 
Their ratios of power and representation are historical and 
legal. The last Reform bill took away political power 
from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst Birmingham 
and Manchester, whose mills paid for the wars of Europe, 
had no representative. Purity in the elective Parliament 

3 See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66. New York, 1853. 



378 ENGLISH TRAITS 

is secured by the purchase of seats. 4 Foreign power is kept 
by armed colonies; power at home, by a standing army of 
police. The pauper lives better than the free laborer; the 
thief better than the pauper; and the transported felon 
better than the one under imprisonment. The crimes are 
factitious, as smuggling, poaching, non-conformity, heresy, 
and treason. Better, they say in England, kill a man than 
a hare. The sovereignty of the seas is maintained by the 
impressment of seamen. " The impressment of seamen," 
said Lord Eldon, " is the life of our navy." Solvency is 
maintained by means of the national debt, on the principle, 
" If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you ? " 
For the administration of justice, Sir Samuel Romilly's ex- 
pedient for clearing the arrears of business in Chancery, 
was, the Chancellor's staying away entirely from his court. 
Their system of education is factitious. The Universities 
galvanize dead languages into a semblance of life. Their 
church is artificial. The manners and customs of society 
are artificial; — made up men with made up manners; — and 
thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation 
whose existence is a work of art; — a cold, barren, almost 
arctic isle, being made the most fruitful, luxurious, and 
imperial land in the whole earth. 

Man in England submits to be a product of political econ- 
omy. On a bleak moor, a mill is built, a banking-house is 
opened, and men come in, as water in a sluice-way, and 
towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham button. 
The rapid doubling of the population dates from Watt's 
steam-engine. A landlord, who owns a province, says, "The 
tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep." He unroofs 
the houses, and ships the population to America. The nation 
is accustomed to the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is 
the maxim of their economists, " that the greater part in 
value of the wealth now existing in England has been pro- 
duced by human hands within the last twelve months." Mean- 
time three or four days' rain will reduce hundreds to starving 
in London. 

One secret of their power is their mutual good under- 

4 Sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that the only inde- 
pendent mode of entering Parliament was to buy a seat, and he bought 
Horsham. 



ABILITY 379 

standing. Not only good minds are born among them, but, 
all the people have good minds. Every nation has yielded 
some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes, only one. 
But the intellectual organization of the English admits a 
communicableness of knowledge and ideas among them all. 
An electric touch by any of their national ideas, melts them 
into one family, and brings the hoards of power which 
their individuality is always hiving, into use and play for 
all. Is it the smallness of the country, or is it the pride and 
affection of race, — they have solidarity, or responsibleness, 
and trust in each other. 

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more 
lasting than the cloth. They embrace their cause with more 
tenacity than their life. Though not military, yet every 
common subject by the poll is fit to make a soldier of. 
These private reserved mute family-men can adopt a public 
end with all their heat, and this strength of affection makes 
the romance of their heroes. The difference of rank does 
not divide the national heart. The Danish poet Ohlen- 
schlager complains that who writes in Danish writes to two 
hundred readers. In Germany, there is one speech for the 
learned, and another for the masses, to that extent that, it 
is said, no sentiment or phrase from the works of any great 
German writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But 
in England, the language of the noble is the language of 
the poor. In Parliament, in pulpits, in theatres, when the 
speakers rise to thought and passion, the language becomes 
idiomatic ; the people in the street best understand the best 
words. And their language seems drawn from the Bible, 
the common law, and the works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, 
Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns, and Scott. The island has pro- 
duced two or three of the greatest men that ever existed, but 
they were not solitary in their own time. Men quickly em- 
bodied what Newton found out, in Greenwich observatories, 
and practical navigation. The boys know all that Hutton knew 
of strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels; 
and these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what 
is invented or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, 
or in art, or in literature, and antiquities. A great ability, 
not amassed on a few giants, but poured into the general 



380 ENGLISH TRAITS 

mind, so that each of them could at a pinch stand in the 
shoes of the other; and they are more bound in character, 
than differenced in ability or in rank. The laborer is a possi- 
ble lord. The lord is a possible basket-maker. Every man 
carries the English system in his brain, knows what is con- 
fided to him, and does therein the best he can. The chancellor 
carries England on his mace, the midshipman at the point of 
his dirk, the smith on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his 
spoon ; the postilion cracks his whip for England, and the sailor 
times his oars to " God save the King ! " The very felons 
have their pride in each other's English stanchness. In 
politics and in war, they hold together as by hooks of steel. 
The charm in Nelson's history is the unselfish greatness; 
the assurance of being supported to the uttermost by those 
whom he supports to the uttermost. Whilst they are some 
ages ahead of the rest of the world in the art of living; 
whilst in some directions they do not represent the modern 
spirit, but constitute it, — this vanguard of civility and 
power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lock-step, foot 
after foot, file after file of heroes, ten thousand deep. 



CHAPTER VI 

MANNERS 

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands 
firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they 
value in their horses, mettle and bottom. On the day of my 
arrival at Liverpool, a gentleman, in describing to me the 
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, happened to say, " Lord Claren- 
don has pluck. like a cock, and will fight till he dies;" and 
what I heard first I heard last, and the one thing the 
English value is pluck. The cabmen have it; the merchants 
have it; the bishops have it; the women have it; the 
journals have it; the Times newspaper, they say, is the 
pluckiest thing in England, and Sydney Smith had made 
it a proverb that little Lord John Russell, the minister, 
would take the command of the Channel fleet to-morrow. 

They require you to dare to be of your own opinion, and 






MANNERS 381 

they hate the practical cowards who cannot in affairs 
answer directly yes or no. They dare to displease, nay, 
they will let you break all the commandments, if you do it 
natively, and with spirit. You must be somebody; then you 
may do this or that, as you will. 

Machinery has been applied to all work, and carried to 
such perfection, that little is left for the men but to mind 
the engines and feed the furnaces. But the machines re- 
quire punctual service, and, as they never tire, they prove 
too much for their tenders. Mines, forges, mills, breweries, 
railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, drill of regiments, 
drill of police, rule of court, and shop-rule have operated 
to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and action 
of men. A terrible machine has possessed itself of the 
ground, the air, the men and women, and hardly even 
thought is free. 

The mechanical might and organization requires in the 
people constitution and answering spirits: and he who goes 
among them must have some weight of metal. At last, you 
take your hint from the fury of life you find, and say, one 
thing is plain, this is no country for fainthearted people: 
don't creep about diffidently; make up your mind; take your 
own course, and you shall find respect and furtherance. 

It requires, men say, a good constitution to travel in Spain. 
I say as much of England, for other cause, simply on ac- 
count of the vigor and brawn of the people. Nothing but 
the most serious business could give one any counterweight 
to these Baresarks, though they were only to order eggs and 
muffins for their breakfast. The Englishman speaks with all 
his body. His elocution is stomachic, — as the American's is 
labial. The Englishman is very petulant and precise about 
his accommodation at inns, and on the roads ; a quiddle about 
his toast and his chop, and every species of convenience, 
and loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience at any 
neglect. His vivacity betrays itself, at all points, in his man- 
ners, in his respiration, and the inarticulate noises he makes 
in clearing the throat ; — all significant of burly strength. He 
has stamina ; he can take the initiative in emergencies. He 
has that aplomb, which results from a good adjustment of 
the moral and physical nature, and the obedience of all the 



382 ENGLISH TRAITS 

powers to the will ; as if the axes of his eyes were united to 
his backbone, and only moved with the trunk. 

This vigor appears in the incuriosity, and stony neglect, 
each of every other. Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, 
dresses, gesticulates, and, in every manner, acts and suffers 
without reference to the bystanders, in his own fashion, 
only careful not to interfere with them, or annoy them; not 
that he is trained to neglect the eyes of his neighbors, — he 
is really occupied with his own affair, and does not think 
of them. Every man in this polished country consults only 
his convenience, as much as a solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. I 
know not where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, 
and no man gives himself any concern with it. An English- 
man walks in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella 
like a walking-stick ; wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or 
stands on his head, and no remark is made. And as he has 
been doing this for several generations, it is now in the blood. 

In short, every one of these islanders is an island himself, 
safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of strangers, 
you would think him deaf; his eyes never wander from his 
table and newspaper. He is never betrayed into any curi- 
osity or unbecoming emotion. They have all been trained 
in one severe school of manners, and never put off the 
harness. He does not give his hand. He does not let you 
meet his eye. It is almost an affront to look a man in 
the face, without being introduced. In mixed or in select 
companies they do not introduce persons ; so that a presenta- 
tion is a circumstance as valid as a contract. Introductions 
are sacraments. He withholds his name. At the hotel, he 
is hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book-office. 
If he give you his private address on a card, it is like an 
avowal of friendship ; and his bearing, on being introduced, 
is cold, even though he is seeking your acquaintance, and is 
studying how he shall serve you. 

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy that, in my 
lectures, I hesitated to read and threw out for its imperti- 
nence many a disparaging phrase, which I had been ac- 
customed to spin, about poor, thin, unable mortals ; — so much 
had the fine physique and the personal vigor of this robust 
race worked on my imagination. 



MANNERS 383 

I happened to arrive in England at the moment of a com- 
mercial crisis. But it was evident that, let who will fail, 
England will not. These people have sat here a thousand 
years, and here will continue to sit. They will not break 
up, or arrive at any desperate revolution, like their neigh- 
bors; for they have as much energy, as much continence of 
character as they ever had. The power and possession 
which surround them are their own creation, and they exert 
the same commanding industry at this moment. 

They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving 
routine, and conventional ways ; loving truth and religion, to 
be sure, but inexorable on points of form. All the world 
praises the comfort and private appointments of an English 
inn, and of English households. You are sure of neatness 
and of personal decorum. A Frenchman may possibly be 
clean ; an Englishman is conscientiously clean. A certain or- 
der and complete propriety is found in his dress and in his 
belongings. 

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him in doors 
whenever he is at rest, and being of an affectionate and loyal 
temper, he dearly loves his house. If he is rich, he buys a 
demesne and builds a hall; if he is in middle condition, he 
spares no expense on his house. Without, it is all planted: 
within, it is wainscoted, carved, curtained, hung with pic- 
tures, and filled with good furniture. 'Tis a passion which 
survives all others, to deck and improve it. Hither he brings 
all that is rare and costly, and with the national tendency to 
sit fast in the same spot for many generations, it comes to 
be, in the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts, and 
trophies of the adventures and exploits of the family. He is 
very fond of silver plate, and, though he have no gallery of 
portraits of his ancestors, he has of their punch-bowls and 
porringers. Incredible amounts of plate are found in good 
houses, and the poorest have some spoon or saucepan, gift 
of a godmother, saved out of better times. 

An English family consists of a few persons, who, from 
youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each 
other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that 
cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese. 
England produces under favorable conditions of ease and 



384 ENGLISH TRAITS 

culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are 
affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine 
them. Nothing can be more delicate without being fan- 
tastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, 
than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes. The 
song of 1596 says, " The wife of every Englishman is counted 
blest." The sentiment of Imogen in Cymbeline is copied from 
English nature; and not less the Portia of Brutus, the Kate 
Percy, and the Desdemona. The romance does not exceed 
the height of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, or in 
Lady Russell, or even as one discerns through the plain prose 
of Pepys's Diary, the sacred habit of an English wife. Sir 
Samuel Romilly could not bear the death of his wife. Every 
class has its noble and tender examples. 

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to 
branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade 
and empire is to guard the independence and privacy of their 
homes. Nothing so much marks their manners as the con- 
centration on their household ties. This domesticity is car- 
ried into court and camp. Wellington governed India and 
Spain and his own troops, and fought battles like a good 
family-man, paid his debts, and, though general of an army 
in Spain, could not stir abroad for fear of public creditors. 
This taste for house and parish merits has of course its 
doting and foolish side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge 
popularity of Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the fact 
that he was wont to go to church, every Sunday, with a large 
quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm, his wife hanging on 
the other, and followed by a long brood of children. 

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their 
wig and mace, sceptre and crown. The Middle Ages still 
lurk in the streets of London. The Knights of the Bath 
take oath to defend injured ladies; the gold-stick-in-waiting 
survives. They repeated the ceremonies of the eleventh 
century in the coronation of the present "Queen. A heredi- 
tary tenure is natural to them. Offices, farms, trades, and 
traditions descend so. Their leases run for a hundred and 
a thousand years. Terms of service and partnership are 
lifelong, or are inherited. " Holdship has been with me," 
said Lord Eldon, " eight-and-twenty years, knows all my 






MANNERS 385 

business and books." Antiquity of usage is sanction 
enough. Wordsworth says of the small freeholders of West- 
moreland, " Many of these humble sons of the hills had a 
consciousness that the land which they tilled had for more 
than five hundred years been possessed by men of the same 
name and blood." The ship-carpenter in the public yards, 
my lord's gardener and porter, have been there for more 
than a hundred years, grandfather, father, and son. 

The English power resides also in their dislike of change. 
They have difficulty in bringing their reason to act, and on 
all occasions use their memory first. As soon as they have 
rid themselves of some grievance, and settled the better 
practice, they make haste to fix it as a finality, and never 
wish to hear of alteration more. 

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor : His in- 
stinct is to search for a precedent. The favorite phrase of 
their law is, " a custom whereof the memory of man runneth 
not back to the contrary." The barons say, " Nolumus 
mutari;' 3 and the cockneys stifle the curiosity of the foreigner 
on the reason of any practice, with " Lord, sir, it was al- 
ways so." They hate innovation. Bacon told them, Time 
was the right reformer; Chatham, that "confidence was a 
plant of slow growth ;" Canning, to " advance with the 
times ; " and Wellington, that " habit was ten times nature." 
All their statesmen learn the irresistibility of the tide of 
custom, and have invented many fine phrases to cover this 
slowness of perception, and prehensility of tail. 

A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because 
it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard 
finish of the men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry 
or a murex. After the spire and the spines are formed, or, 
with the formation, a juice exudes, and a hard enamel var- 
nishes every part. The keeping of the proprieties is as in- 
dispensable as clean linen. No merit quite countervails the 
want of this, whilst this sometimes stands in lieu of all. 
" 'Tis in bad taste " is the most formidable word an English- 
man can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. There 
is a prose in certain Englishmen, which exceeds in wooden 
deadness all rivalry with other countrymen. There is a 
knell in the conceit and externality of their voice, which 



386 ENGLISH TRAITS 

seems to say, Leave all hope behind. In this Gibraltar of 
propriety mediocrity gets intrenched, and consolidated, and 
founded in adamant. An Englishman of fashion is like one 
of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched with deli- 
cate engravings, on thick hot-pressed paper, fit for the hands 
of ladies and princes, but with nothing in it worth reading 
or remembering. 

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. When 
Thalberg, the pianist, was one evening performing before 
the Queen, at Windsor, in a private party, the Queen ac- 
companied him with her voice. The circumstance took air, 
and all England shuddered from sea to sea. The indecorum 
was never repeated. Cold, repressive manners prevail. No 
enthusiasm is permitted, except at the opera. They avoid 
everything marked. They require a tone of voice that ex- 
cites no attention in the room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of 
the patron saints of England, of whom Wotton said, " His 
wit was the measure of congruity." 

Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They 
keep to the other extreme of low tone in dress and man- 
ners. They avoid pretension, and go right to the heart of 
the thing. They hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high- 
flown expression ; they use a studied plainness. Even Brum- 
mel, their fop, was marked by the severest simplicity in 
dress. They value themselves on the absence of everything 
theatrical in the public business, and on conciseness and 
going to the point, in private affairs. 

In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial 
by Jury, but the dinner, is the capital institution. It is the 
mode of doing honor to a stranger, to invite him to eat, — 
and has been for many hundred years. "And they think," 
says the Venetian traveller of 1500, "no greater honor can 
be conferred or received than to invite others to eat with 
them, or to be invited themselves, and they would sooner 
give five or six ducats to provide an entertainment for a 
person, than a groat to assist him in any distress." 1 It is 
reserved to the end of the day, the family-hour being gen- 
erally six, in London, and, if any company is expected, one 
or two hours later. Every one dresses for dinner, in his 

1 " Relation of England." Printed by the Camden Society. 



TRUTH 387 

own house, or in another man's. The guests are expected 
to arrive within half an hour of the time fixed by card of 
invitation, and nothing but death' or mutilation is permitted 
to detain them. The English dinner is precisely the model 
on which our own are constructed in the Atlantic cities. 
The company sit one or two hours before the ladies leave 
the table. The gentlemen remain over their wine an hour 
longer, and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room, and take 
coffee. The dress-dinner generates a talent of table-talk 
which reaches great perfection : the stories are so good, 
that one is sure they must have been often told before, to 
have got such happy turns. Hither come all manner of 
clever projects, bits of popular science, of practical inven- 
tion, of miscellaneous humor; political, literary, and per- 
sonal news ; railroads, horses, diamonds, agriculture, horti- 
culture, pisciculture, and wine. 

English stories, bon-mots, and the recorded table-talk of 
their wits, are as good as the best of the French. In Amer- 
ica we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained the same 
perfection: for the range of nations from which London 
draws, and the steep contrasts of condition, create the 
picturesque in society, as broken country makes picturesque 
landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie 
tameness : and secondly, because the usage of a dress-dinner 
every day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to ad- 
vantage everything good. Much attrition has worn every 
sentence into a bullet. Also one meets now and then with 
polished men who know everything, have tried everything, 
can do everything, and are quite superior to letters and 
science. What could they not, if only they would? 



CHAPTER VII 

TRUTH 

The Teutonic tribes have a national singleness of heart, 
which contrasts with the Latin races. The German name 
has a proverbial significance of sincerity and honest mean- 
ing. The arts bear testimony to it. The faces of clergy 



388 ENGLISH TRAITS 

and laity in old sculptures and illuminated missals are 
charged with earnest belief. Add to this hereditary recti- 
tude, the punctuality and precise dealing which commerce 
creates, and you have the English truth and credit. The 
government strictly performs its engagements. The sub- 
jects do not understand trifling on its part. When any 
breach of promise occurred, in the old days of prerogative, 
it was resented by the people as an intolerable grievance. 
And, in modern times, any slipperiness in the government 
in political faith, or any repudiation or crookedness in 
matters of finance, would bring the whole nation to a 
committee of inquiry and reform. Private men keep their 
promises, never so trivial. Down goes the flying word on 
the tablets, and is indelible as Domesday Book. 

Their practical power rests on their national sincerity. 
Veracity derives from instinct, and marks superiority in 
organization. Nature has endowed some animals with 
cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld; but it 
has provoked the malice of all others, as if avengers 
of public wrong. In the nobler kinds, where strength could 
be afforded, her races are loyal to truth, as truth is the 
foundation of the social state. Beasts that make no truce 
with man, do not break faith with each other. 'Tis said 
that the wolf, who makes a cache of his prey, and brings 
his fellows with him to the spot, if, on digging, it is not 
found, is instantly and unresistingly torn in pieces. English 
veracity seems to result on a sounder animal structure, 
as if they could afford it. They are blunt in saying what 
they think, sparing of promises, and they require plain- 
dealing of others. We will not have to do with a man in 
a mask. Let us know the truth. Draw a straight line, 
hit whom and where it will. Alfred, whom the affection 
of the nation makes the type of their race, is called by 
his friend Asser, the truth-speaker; Alueredus veridicus. 
Geoffrey of Monmouth says of King Aurelius, uncle of 
Arthur, that "above all things he hated a lie." The North- 
man Guttorm said to King Olaf, " It is royal work to fulfil 
royal words." The mottoes of their families are monitory 
proverbs, as, Fare fac, — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes ; Say 
and seal, of the house of Fiennes; Vero nil verius, of the 



TRUTH 389 

DeVeres. To be king of their word, is their pride. When 
they unmask cant, they say, " The English of this is," &c. ; 
and to give the lie is the extreme insult. The phrase of 
the lowest of the people is " honor-bright," and their vul- 
gar praise, " His word is as good as his bond." They hate 
shuffling and equivocation, and the cause is damaged in 
the public opinion, on which any paltering can be fixed. 
Even Lord Chesterfield, with his French breeding, when 
he came to define a gentleman, declared that truth made 
his distinction : and nothing ever spoken by him would find 
so hearty a suffrage from his nation. The Duke of Well- 
ington, who' had the best right to say so, advises the French 
General Kellermann, that he may rely on the parole of 
an English officer. The English, of all classes, value them- 
selves on this trait, as distinguishing them from the French, 
who, in the popular belief, are more polite than true. An 
Englishman understates, avoids the superlative, checks him- 
self in compliments, alleging that in the French language 
one cannot speak without lying. 

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, and do 
not easily learn to make a show, and take the world as it 
goes. They are not fond of ornaments, and if they wear 
them, they must be gems. They read gladly in old Fuller, 
that a lady, in the reign of Elizabeth, " would have as 
patiently digested a lie, as the wearing of false stones or 
pendants of counterfeit pearl." They have the earth- 
hunger, or preference for property in land, which is said 
to mark the Teutonic nations. They build of stone: public 
and private buildings are massive and durable. In com- 
paring their ships' houses and public offices with the Amer- 
ican, it is commonly said that they spend a pound where we 
spend a dollar. Plain rich clothes, plain rich equipage, 
plain rich finish throughout their house and belongings, 
mark the English truth. 

They confide in each other, — English believes in English. 
The French feel the superiority of this probity. The 
Englishman is not springing a trap for his admiration, 
but is honestly minding his business.' The Frenchman is 
vain. Madame de Stael says that the English irritated 
Napoleon, mainly, because they have found out how to unite 

y hc v 



390 ENGLISH TRAITS 

success with honesty. She was not aware how wide an 
application her foreign readers would give to the remark. 
Wellington discovered the ruin of Bonaparte's affairs, by 
his own probity. He augured ill of the empire, as soon as 
he saw that it was mendacious, and lived by war. If war 
do not bring in its sequel new trade, better agriculture and 
manufactures, but only games, fireworks and spectacles, — 
no prosperity could support it; much less, a nation deci- 
mated for conscripts, and out of pocket, like France. So 
he drudged for years on his military works at Lisbon, and 
from this base at last extended his gigantic lines to Water- 
loo, believing in his countrymen and their syllogisms above 
all the rhodomontade of Europe. 

At a St. George's festival, in Montreal, where I happened 
to be a guest, since my return home, I observed that the 
chairman complimented his compatriots, by saying, " they 
confided that wherever they met an Englishman, they found 
a man who would speak the truth." And one cannot think 
this festival fruitless, if, all over the world, on the 23d 
of April, wherever two or three English are found, they 
meet to encourage each other in the nationality of veracity. 

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the 
lion's mouth, no men surpass them. On the king's birthday, 
when each bishop was expected to offer the king a purse 
of gold, Latimer gave Henry VIII. a copy of the Vulgate, 
with a mark at the passage, " Whoremongers and adulterers 
God will judge; " and they so honor stoutness in each other, 
that the king passed it over. They are tenacious of their 
belief, and cannot easily change their opinions to suit ';he 
hour. They are like ships with too much head on to come 
quickly about, nor will prosperity or even adversity be al- 
lowed to shake their habitual view of conduct. Whilst 
I was in London, M. Guizot arrived there on his escape 
from Paris, in February 1848. Many private friends called 
on him. His name was immediately proposed as an hon- 
orary member of the Athenaeum. M. Guizot was black- 
balled. Certainly, they knew the distinction of his name. 
But the Englishman is not fickle. Tie had really made up 
his mind, now for years as he read his newspaper, to hate 
and despise M. Guizot; and the altered position of the man 



TRUTH 391 

as an illustrious exile, and a guest in the country, make no 
difference to him, as they would instantly, to an American. 

They require the same adherence, thorough conviction 
and reality in public men. It is the want of character which 
makes the low reputation of the Irish members. " See 
them," they said, " one hundred and twenty-seven all voting 
like sheep, never proposing anything, and all but four 
voting the income tax," — which was an ill-judged con- 
cession of the Government, relieving Irish property from 
the burdens charged on English. 

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of Parlia- 
ment. The ruling passion of Englishmen, in these days, 
is a terror of humbug. In the same proportion, they value 
honesty, stoutness, and adherence to your own. They like 
a man committed to his objects. They hate the French, as 
frivolous; they hate the Irish, as aimless; they hate the 
Germans, as professors. In February, 1848, they said, 
Look, the French king and his party fell for want of a 
shot; they had not conscience to shoot, so entirely was the 
pith and heart of monarchy eaten out." 

They attack their own politicians every day, on the same 
grounds, as adventurers. They love stoutness in standing 
for your right, in declining money or promotion that costs 
any concession. The barrister refuses the silk gown of 
Queen's Counsel, if his junior have it one day earlier. 
Lord Collingwood would not accept his medal for victory 
on 14th February, 1797, if he did not receive one for vic- 
tory on 1st June, 1794; and the long withholden medal was 
accorded. When Castlereagh dissuaded Lord Wellington 
from going to the king's levee, until the unpopular Cintra 
business had been explained, he replied, " You furnish me 
a reason for going. I will go to this, or I will never go 
to a king's levee." The radical mob at Oxford cried after 
the tory Lord Eldon, "There's old Eldon; cheer him; he 
never ratted." They have given the parliamentary nick- 
name of Trimmers to the timeservers, whom English char- 
acter does not love. 1 

1 It is an unlucky moment to remember these sparkles of solitary virtue 
in the face of the honors lately paid in England to the Emperor Louis 
Napoleon. I am sure that no Englishman whom I had the happiness to 
know consented, when the aristocracy and the commons of London cringed 



392 ENGLISH TRAITS 

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary 
delusions, thus, to believe what stands recorded in the 
gravest books, that the movement of 10 April, 1848, was 
urged or assisted by foreigners: which, to be sure, is paral- 
leled by the democratic whimsy in this country, which I 
have noticed to be shared by men sane on other points, 
that the English are at the bottom of the agitation of slav- 
ery, in American politics: and then again to the French 
popular legends on the subject of perfidious Albion. But 
suspicion will make fools of nations as of citizens. 

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and ready 
than other countrymen, and has given occasion to the 
observation, that English wit comes afterwards, — which the 
French denote as esprit d'escalier. This dulness makes 
their attachment to home, and their adherence in all 
foreign countries to home habits. The Englishman who 
visits Mount Etna, will carry his teakettle to the top. The 
old Italian author of the "Relation of England" (in 1500) 
says, " I have it on the best information, that, when the 
war is actually raging most furiously, they will seek for 
good eating, and all their other comforts, without thinking 
what harm might befall them." Then their eyes seem to 
be set at the bottom of a tunnel, and they affirm the one 
small fact they know, with the best faith in the world 
that nothing else exists. And, as their own belief in guineas 
is perfect, they readily, on all occasions, apply the pecuniary 
argument as final. Thus when the Rochester rappings be- 
gan to be heard of in England, a man deposited £100 in a 
sealed box in the Dublin Bank, and then advertised in 
the newspapers to all somnambulists, mesmerizers, and 
others, that whoever could tell him the number of 
his note, should have the money. He let it lie there 
six months, the newspapers now and then, at his instance, 
stimulating the attention of the adepts; but none could 
ever tell him ; and he said, " Now let me never be bothered 
more with this proven lie." It is told of a good Sir John, 
that he heard a case stated by counsel, and made up his 

like a Neapolitan rabble, before a successful thief. But — how to resist one 
step, though odious, in a linked series of state necessities?— Governments 
must always learn too late, that the use of dishonest agents is as ruinous 
for nations as for single men. 



i 



CHARACTER 393 

mind; then the counsel for the other side taking their turn 
to speak, he found himself so unsettled and perplexed, that 
he exclaimed, " So help me God ! I will never listen to 
evidence again." Any number of delightful examples of 
this English stolidity are the anecdotes of Europe. I knew 
a very worthy man, — a magistrate, I believe he was, in the 
town of Derby, — who went to the opera, to see Malibran. 
In one scene, the heroine was to rush across a ruined 
bridge. Mr. B. arose, and mildly yet firmly called the at- 
tention of the audience and the performers to the fact that, 
in his judgment, the bridge was unsafe! This English 
stolidity contrasts with French wit and tact. The French, 
it is commonly said, have greatly more influence in Europe 
than the English. What influence the English have is by 
brute force of wealth and power; that of the French by 
affinity and talent. The Italian is subtle, the Spaniard 
treacherous : tortures, it was said, could never wrest from 
an Egyptian the confession of a secret. None of these 
traits belong to the Englishman. His choler and conceit 
force everything out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen 
well, says of them, 

" In close intrigue, their faculty's but weak, 
For generally whate'er they know, they speak, 
And often their own counsels undermine 
By mere infirmity without design; 
From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed, 
That English treasons never can succeed; 
For they're so open-hearted, you may know 
Their own most secret thoughts, and others' too." 



CHAPTER VIII 

CHARACTER 

The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that 
they have sadder brows than their neighbors of northern 
climates. They are sad by comparison with the singing 
and dancing nations : not sadder, but slow and staid, as find- 
ing their joys at home. They, too, believe that where there 
is no enjoyment of life, there can be no vigor and art in 



394 ENGLISH TRAITS 

speech or thought: that your merry heart goes all the way, 
your sad one tires in a mile. This trait of gloom has been 
fixed on them by French travellers, who from Froissart, 
Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists 
of the feuilletons, have spent their wit on the solemnity of 
their neighbors. The French say, gay conversation is un- 
known in their island. The Englishman finds no relief from 
reflection, except in reflection. When he wishes for amuse- 
ment, he goes to work. His hilarity is like an attack of 
fever. Religion, the theatre, and the reading the books 
of his country, all feed and increase his natural melancholy. 
The police does not interfere with public diversions. It 
thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleasures and rare 
gayety of this inconsolable nation; and their well-known 
courage is entirely attributable to their disgust of life. 

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words 
have obtained this reputation. As compared with the Ameri- 
cans, I think them cheerful and contented. Young people 
in this country are much more prone to melancholy. The Eng- 
lish have a mild aspect, and a ringing, cheerful voice. They 
are large natured, and not so easily amused as the southern- 
ers, and are among them as grown people among children, 
requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or science, instead 
of frivolous games. They are proud and private, and, even if 
disposed to recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported 
sadly; Us s'amusaient tristement, selon la coutume de leur 
pays, said Froissart; and I suppose never nation built their par- 
ty-walls so thick, or their garden-fences so high. Meat and 
wine produce no effect on them: they are just as cold, quiet 
and composed at the end, as at the beginning of dinner. 

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six or 
seven hundred years ; and a kind of pride in bad public 
speaking is noted in the House of Commons, as if they were 
willing to show that they did not live by their tongues, or 
thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentle- 
men. In mixed company they shut their mouths. A York- 
shire mill-owner told me he had ridden more than once all 
the way from London to Leeds, in the first-class carriage, 
with the same persons, and no word exchanged. The club- 
houses were established to cultivate social habits, and it is 



CHARACTER 395 

rare that more than two eat together, and oftenest one 
eats alone. Was it, then, a stroke of humor in the serious 
Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless logic, that made him 
shut up the English souls in a heaven by themselves ? 

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, and 
stubborn, — and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth is, 
they have great range and variety of character. Commerce 
sends abroad multitudes of different classes. The choleric 
Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in the East 
or West Indies, are wide of the perfect behavior of the 
educated and dignified man of family. So is the burly 
farmer ; so is the country 'squire, with his narrow and violent 
life. In every inn is the Commercial-Room, in which " travel- 
lers," or bagmen who carry patterns, and solicit orders for 
the manufacturers, are wont to be entertained. It easily 
happens that this class should characterize England to the 
foreigner, who meets them on the road and at every public 
house, whilst the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude them- 
selves whilst in them. 

But these classes are the right English stock, and may 
fairly show the national qualities before yet art and educa- 
tion have dealt with them. They are good lovers, good 
haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and in all things very 
much steeped in their temperament, like men hardly awaked 
from deep sleep which they enjoy. Their habits and instincts 
cleave to nature. They are of the earth, earthy; and of the 
sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for what it yields them, 
and not from any sentiment. They are full of coarse 
strength, rude exercise, butcher's meat, and sound sleep; and 
suspect any poetic insinuation, or any hint for the conduct 
of life which reflects on this animal existence, as if some- 
body were fumbling at the umbilical cord, and might stop their 
supplies. They doubt a man's sound judgment if he does not 
eat with appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly 
chaste. Take them as they come, you shall find in the com- 
mon people a surly indifference, sometimes gruffness and 
ill temper; and, in minds of more power, magazines of in- 
exhaustible war, challenging 

" The ruggedest hour that time and spite can bring 
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland." 



396 ENGLISH TRAITS 

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opin- 
ion, and not less resolute in maintaining their whim and 
perversity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a book against the 
Lord's Prayer. And one can believe that Burton, the Anat- 
omist of Melancholy, having predicted from the stars the 
hour of his death, slipped the knot himself round his own 
neck, not to falsify his horoscope. 

Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness : they have 
extreme difficulty to run away, and will die game. Welling- 
ton said of the young coxcombs of the Life-Guards, deli- 
cately brought up, " But the puppies fight well ;" and Nelson 
said of his sailors, " They really mind shot no more than 
peas." Of absolute stoutness no nation has more or better 
examples. They are good at storming redoubts, at boarding 
frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate service 
which has daylight and honor in it; but not, I think, at en- 
during the rack, or any passive obedience, like jumping off 
a castle-roof at the word of a czar. Being both vascular 
and highly organized, so as to be very sensible of pain; and 
intellectual, so as to see reason arid glory in a matter. 

Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies of 
the day, they have the more than enough, the excess which 
creates courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, invention in 
mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence in wealth, splen- 
dor in ceremonies, petulance and projects in youth. The 
young men have a rude health which runs into peccant hu- 
mors. They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their 
quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, 
and fencing, and run into absurd frolics with the gravity 
of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and 
corner of the earth their turbulent sense leaving no lie un- 
contradicted ; no pretension unexamined. They chew hash- 
eesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases; swing their 
hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas; taste every 
poison; buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's 
blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 
" winking Virgin," to know why she winks ; measure with an 
English footrule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish 
caaba, every Holy of holies; translate and send to Bentley 
the arcanum bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bra- 






CHARACTER 397 

mins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause. 
These travellers are of every class, the best and the worst; 
and it may easily happen that those of rudest behavior are 
taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon melancholy 
in the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor, 
which every check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. 
There are multitudes of rude young English who have the 
self-sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, with 
their disdain of the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion 
and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for 
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad de- 
scription of the Briton generically, what was said two hun- 
dred years ago, of one particular Oxford scholar : " He was 
a very bold man, uttered anything that came into his mind, 
not only among his companions, but in public coffee-houses, 
and would often speak his mind of particular persons then 
accidentally present, without examining the company he was 
in; for which he was often reprimanded, and several times 
threatened to be kicked and beaten." 

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal 
article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a right 
to his own ears. No man can claim to usurp more than a few 
cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, or to put upon 
the company with the loud statement of his crotchets or 
personalities. 

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of 
nations are written, and however derived, whether a happier 
tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or what circumstance, 
that mixed for them the golden mean of temperament, — 
here exists the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad- 
bottomed, best for depth, range, and equability, men of 
aplomb and reserves, great range and many moods, strong in- 
stincts, yet apt for culture; war-class as well as clerks; earls 
and tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish majority; 
abysmal temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on 
which no sunshine settles; alternated with a common sense 
and humanity which hold them fast to every piece of cheer- 
ful duty; making this temperament, a sea to which all storms 
are superficial; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if 
they alone had the elastic organization at once fine and 



398 ENGLISH TRAITS 

robust enough for dominion; as if the burly, inexpressive, 
now mute and contumacious, now fierce and sharp-tongued 
dragon, which once made the island light with his fiery 
breath, had bequeathed his ferocity to his conqueror. They 
hide virtues under vices, or the semblance of them. It is 
the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll again, who lifts the 
cart out of the mire, or " threshes the corn that ten day- 
laborers could not end/' but it is done in the dark, and with 
muttered maledictions. He is a churl with a soft place in 
his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who 
loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, and serves you, 
and your thanks disgust him. Here was lately a cross- 
grained miser, odd and ugly, resembling in countenance the 
portrait of Punch, with the laugh left out; rich by his own 
industry ; sulking in a lonely house ; who never gave a dinner 
to any man, and disdained all courtesies; yet as true a wor- 
shipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed, and pro- 
fusely pouring over the cold mind of his countrymen creations 
of grace and truth, removing the reproach of sterility from 
English art, catching from their savage climate every fine 
hint, and importing into their galleries every tint and trait 
of sunnier cities and skies; making an era in painting; and, 
when he saw that the splendor of one of his pictures in the 
Exhibition dimmed his rival's that hung next it, secretly took 
a brush and blackened his own. 

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws to 
peck at. They have that phlegm or staidness, which it is 
a compliment to disturb. " Great men," said Aristotle, " are 
always of a nature originally melancholy." 'Tis the habit of 
a mind which attaches to abstractions with a passion which 
gives vast results. They dare to displease, they do not speak 
to expectation. They like the sayers of No, better than the 
sayers of Yes. Each of them has an opinion which he feels 
it becomes him to express all the more that it differs from 
yours. They are meditating opposition. This gravity is in- 
separable from minds of great resources. 

There is an English hero superior to the French, the Ger- 
man, the Italian, or the Greek. When he is brought to the 
strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer material possession, 
and on more purely metaphysical grounds. He is there with 



CHARACTER 399 

his own consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies. 
On deliberate choice, and from grounds of character, he has 
elected his part to live and die for, and dies with grandeur. 
This race has added new elements to humanity, and has a 
deeper root in the world. 

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to ex- 
quisite refinement. With larger scale, they have great re- 
trieving power. After running each tendency to an extreme, 
they try another tack with equal heat. More intellectual than 
other races, when they live with other races, they do not take 
their language, but bestow their own. They subsidize other 
nations, and are not subsidized. They proselyte, and are not 
proselyted. They assimilate other races to themselves, and 
are not assimilated. The English did not calculate the con- 
quest of the Indies. It fell to their character. So they ad- 
minister in different parts of the world, the codes of every 
empire and race; in Canada, old French law; in the Mauri- 
tius, the Code Napoleon; in the West Indies, the edicts of 
the Spanish Cortes ; in the East Indies, the Laws of Menu ; 
in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing; at the Cape 
of Good Hope, of the old Netherlands ; and in the Ionian 
Islands, the Pandects of Justinian. 

They are very conscious of their advantageous position in 
history. England is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, 
the ally. Compare the tone of the French and of the English 
press : the first querulous, captious, sensitive about English 
opinion; the English press is never timorous about French 
opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous. 

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will 
and bias; churlish as men sometimes please to be who do not 
forget a debt, who ask no favors, and who will do what they 
like with their own. With education and intercourse, these 
asperities wear off, and leave the good will pure. If anatomy 
is reformed according to national tendencies, I suppose, the 
spleen will hereafter be found in the Englishman, not found 
in the American, and differencing the one from the other. I 
anticipate another anatomical discovery, that this organ will 
be found to be cortical and caducous, that they are super- 
ficially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differing 
from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing savage, nothing 



400 ENGLISH TRAITS 

mean, resides in the English heart. They are subject to 
panics of credulity and of rage, but the temper of the nation, 
however disturbed, settles itself soon and easily, as, in this 
temperate zone, the sky after whatever storms clears again, 
and serenity is its normal condition. 

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception as 
the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when 
they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, 
later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their 
strength. To understand the power of performance that is in 
their finest wits, in the patient Newton, or in the versatile 
transcendent poets, or in the Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, 
Eldons, and Peels, one should see how English day-laborers 
hold out. High and low, they are of an unctuous texture. 
There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if they had 
oil also for their mental wheels, and could perform vast 
amounts of work without damaging themselves. 

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to 
which scholars and professional men conform, proves the 
tension of their muscle, when vast numbers are found who 
can each lift this enormous load. I might even add, their 
daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body. 

No nation was ever so rich in able men; "gentlemen," as 
Charles I. said of Strafford, " whose abilities might make a 
prince rather afraid than ashamed in the greatest affairs of 
state; " men of such temper that, like Baron Vere, " had one 
seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence 
have suspected that he had lost the day; and, had be beheld 
him in a retreat, he would have collected him a conqueror by 
the cheerfulness of his spirit." 1 

The following passage from the Heimskringla might almost 
stand as a portrait of the modern Englishman : — " Haldor 
was very stout and strong, and remarkably handsome in ap- 
pearances. King Harold gave him this testimony, that he, 
among all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances, 
whether they betokened danger or pleasure; for, whatever 
turned up, he was never in higher nor in lower spirits, never 
slept less nor more on account of them, nor ate nor drank 
but according to his custom. Haldor was not a man of many 

1 Fuller. Worthies of England. 






CHARACTER 401 

words, but short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, 
and was obstinate and hard : and this could not please the 
king, who had many clever people about him, zealous in his 
service. Haldor remained a short time with the king, and 
then came to Iceland, where he took up his abode in Hiarda- 
holt, and dwelt in that farm to a very advanced age." 2 

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or 
whiffling. The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, 
which at last sets all its borders in flame. The wrath of 
London is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and, in 
its hottest heat, a register and rule. 

Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable 
of a sublime resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, 
often predicted, and making itself a war of opinions also (a 
question of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern 
Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea- 
kings may take once again to their floating castles, and find a 
new home and a second millennium of power in their colonies. 

The stability of England is the security of the modern 
world. If the English race were as mutable as the French, 
what reliance? But the English stand for liberty. The con- 
servative, money-loving, lord-loving English are yet liberty- 
loving; and so freedom is safe: for they have more personal 
force than any other people. The nation always resist the 
immoral action of their government. They think humanely 
on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, 
of Schleswig-Holstein, though overborne by the statecraft of 
the rulers at last. 

Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent 
bias, which, though not less potent, is masked, as the tribe 
spreads its activity into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, let- 
ters? The early history shows it, as the musician plays the 
air which he proceeds to conceal in a tempest of variations. 
In Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the 
English society, namely, that private life is the place of 
honor. Glory, a career, and ambition, words familiar to the 
longitude of Paris, are seldom heard in English speech. Nel- 
son wrote from their hearts his homely telegraph, " England 
expects every man to do his duty." 

2 Heimskringla, Laing's translation, vol. iii., p. 37. 



402 ENGLISH TRAITS 

For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to 
appease diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy may 
be entered (the worst boys doing well in the navy) ; and the 
civil service, in departments where serious official work is 
done; and they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the 
severer studies of the law. But the calm, sound, and most 
British Briton shrinks from public life, as charlatanism, and 
respects an economy founded on agriculture, coal-mines, 
manufactures, or trade, which secures an independence 
through the creation of real values. 

They wish neither to command nor obey, but to be kings 
in their own houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy 
literature ; they like well to have the world served up to them 
in books, maps, models, and every mode of exact informa- 
tion, and, though not creators in art, they value its refine- 
ment. They are ready for leisure, can direct and fill their 
own day, nor need so much as others the constraint of a 
necessity. But the history of the nation discloses, at every 
turn, this original predilection for private independence, and> 
however this inclination may have been disturbed by the 
bribes with which their vast colonial power has warped men 
out of orbit, the inclination endures, and forms and reforms 
the laws, letters, manners, and occupations. They choose 
that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth, 
knowing that such alone is stable; as wise merchants prefer 
investments in the three per cents. 



CHAPTER IX 

COCKAYNE 

The English are a nation of humorists. Individual right 
is pushed to the uttermost bound compatible with public 
order. Property is so perfect, that it seems the craft of that 
race, and not to exist elsewhere. The king cannot step on 
an acre which the peasant refuses to sell. A testator endows 
a dog or a rookery, and Europe cannot interfere with his 
absurdity. Every individual has his particular way of liv- 
ing, which he pushes to folly, and the decided sympathy of 



COCKAYNE 403 

his compatriots is engaged to back up Mr. Crump's whim by 
statutes, and chancellors, and horse-guards. There is no 
freak so ridiculous but some Englishman has attempted to 
immortalize by money and law. British citizenship is as 
omnipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cockayne is very sensible of 
this. The pursy man means by freedom the right to do as 
he pleases, and does wrong in order to feel his freedom, and 
makes a conscience of persisting in it. 

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so small. His 
confidence in the power and performance of his nation makes 
him provokingly incurious about other nations. He dislikes 
foreigners. Swedenborg, who lived much in England, notes 
" the similitude of minds among the English, in consequence 
of which they contract familiarity with friends who are of 
that nation, and seldom with others : and they regard for- 
eigners, as one looking through a telescope from the top of 
a palace regards those who dwell or wander about out of the 
city." A much older traveller, the Venetian who wrote the 
"Relation of England," 1 in 1500, says: — "The English are 
great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to 
them. They think that there are no other men than them- 
selves, and no other world but England ; and, whenever they 
see a handsome foreigner, they say that he looks like an 
Englishman, and it is a great pity he should not be an Eng- 
lishman; and whenever they partake of any delicacy with a 
foreigner, they ask him whether such a thing is made in 
his country." When he adds epithets of praise, his climax 
is " so English " ; and when he wishes to pay you the highest 
compliment, he says, I should not know you from an English- 
man. France is, by its natural contrast, a kind of black- 
board on which English character draws its own traits in 
chalk. This arrogance habitually exhibits itself in allusions 
to the French. I suppose that all men of English blood in 
America, Europe, or Asia, have a secret feeling of joy 
that they are not French natives. Mr. Coleridge is said to 
have given public thanks to God, at the close of a lecture, 
that he had defended him from being able to utter a single 
sentence in the French language. I have found that English- 
men have such a good opinion of England, that the ordinary 

1 Printed by the Camden Society. 






404 ENGLISH TRAITS 

phrases, in all good society, of postponing or disparaging 
one's own things in talking with a stranger are seriously 
mistaken by them for an insuppressible homage to the merits 
of their nation; and the New Yorker or Pennsylvanian who 
modestly laments the disadvantage of a new country, log 
huts, and savages, is surprised by the instant and unfeigned 
commiseration of the whole company, who plainly account all 
the world out of England a heap of rubbish. 

The same insular limitation pinches his foreign politics. 
He sticks to his traditions and usages, and, so help him God ! 
he will force his island by-laws down the throat of great 
countries, like India, China, Canada, Australia, and not only 
so, but impose Wapping on the Congress of Vienna, and 
trample down all nationalities with his taxed boots. Lord 
Chatham goes for liberty, and no taxation without repre- 
sentation; — for that is British law; but not a hobnail shall 
they dare make in America, but buy their nails in England, 
— for that also is British law ; and the fact that British com- 
merce was to be re-created by the independence of America 
took them all by surprise. 

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so rank and 
aggressive as to be a little incompatible with every other. 
The world is not wide enough for two. 

But, beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, the island 
offers a daily worship to the old Norse god Brage, celebrated 
among our Scandinavian forefathers, for his eloquence and 
majestic air. The English have a steady courage, that fits 
them for great attempts and endurance : they have also a 
petty courage, through which every man delights in showing 
himself for what he is, and in doing what he can; so that, in 
all companies, each of them has too good an opinion of him- 
self to imitate anybody. He hides no defect of his form, 
features, dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every 
circumstance belonging to him comes recommended to you. 
If one of them have a bald, or a red, or a green head, or bow 
legs, or a scar, or mark, or a paunch, or a squeaking or a 
raven voice, he has persuaded himself that there is some- 
thing modish and becoming in it, and that it sits well on him. 

But nature makes nothing in vain, and this little super- 
fluity of self-regard in the English brain is one of the secrets 



COCKAYNE 405 

of their power and history. For, it sets every man on being 
and doing what he really is and can. It takes away a dodg- 
ing, skulking, secondary air, and encourages a frank and 
manly bearing, so that each man makes the most of himself, 
and loses no opportunity for want of pushing. A man's per- 
sonal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world 
precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he 
makes light of them, so will other men. We all find in these 
a convenient metre of character, since a little man would be 
ruined by the vexation. I remember a shrewd politician, in 
one of our western cities, told me, " that he had known sev- 
eral successful statesmen made by their foible." And an- 
other, an ex-governor of Illinois, said to me, " If a man knew 
anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is 
such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, 
and hits on extraordinary discoveries." 

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is un- 
consciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all 
means, draw it all out, and hold him to it. Their culture 
generally enables the travelled English to avoid any ridicu- 
lous extremes of this self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable 
air. Then the natural disposition is fostered by the respect 
which they find entertained in the world for English ability. 
It was said of Louis XIV., that his gait and air were becom- 
ing enough in so great a monarch, yet would have been 
ridiculous in another man; so the prestige of the English 
name warrants a certain confident bearing, which a French- 
man or Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel 
themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone 
on the subject of English merits. 

An English lady on the Rhine, hearing a German speaking 
of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, " No, we are not 
foreigners; we are English; it is you that are foreigners." 
They tell you daily, in London, the story of the Frenchman 
and Englishman who quarrelled. Both were unwilling to 
fight, but their companions put them up to it; at last, it was 
agreed that they should fight alone, in the dark, and with 
pistols : the candles were put out, and the Englishman, to 
make sure not to hit anybody, fired up the chimney, and 
brought down the Frenchman. They have no curiosity about 

z HCV 



406 ENGLISH TRAITS 

foreigners, and answer any information you may volunteer 
with " Oh, oh ! " until the informant makes up his mind that 
they shall die in their ignorance for any help he will offer. 
There are really no limits to this conceit, though brighter 
men among them make painful efforts to be candid. 

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the Times 
newspaper through politicians and poets, through Words- 
worth, Carlyle, Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to the boys 
of Eton. In the gravest treatise on political economy, in a 
philosophical essay, in books of science, one is surprised by 
the most innocent exhibition of unflinching nationality. In 
a tract on Corn, a most amiable and accomplished gentleman 
writes thus : — " Though Britain, according to Bishop Berke- 
ley's idea, were surrounded by a wall of brass ten thousand 
cubits in height, still she would as far excel the rest of the 
globe in riches, as she now does, both in this secondary 
quality, and in the more important ones of freedom, virtue, 
and science." 2 

The English dislike the American structure of society, 
whilst yet trade, mills, public education, and chartism are 
doing what they can to create in England the same social 
condition. America is the paradise of the economists; is the 
favorable exception invariably quoted to the rules of ruin; 
but when he speaks directly of the Americans, the islander 
forgets his philosophy, and remembers his disparaging anec- 
dotes. 

But this childish patriotism costs something, like all nar- 
rowness. The English sway of their colonies has no root 
of kindness. They govern by their arts and ability; they 
are more just than kind; and, whenever an abatement of 
their power is felt, they have not conciliated the affection 
on which to rely. 

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, province, 
or town, are useful in the absence of real ones ; but we 
must not insist on these accidental lines. Individual traits 
are always triumphing over national ones. There is no 
fence in metaphysics discriminating Greek, or English, or 
Spanish science. yEsop, and Montaigne, Cervantes, and 
Saadi are men of the world; and to wave our own flag at 

2 William Spence. 



WEALTH 407 

the dinner-table or in the University, is to carry the bois- 
terous dulness of a fire-club into a polite circle. Nature 
and destiny are always on the watch for our follies. Nature 
trips us up when we strut; and there are curious examples 
in history on this very point of national pride. 

George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Gilicia, was 
a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to supply the 
army with bacon. A rogue and informer, he got rich, and 
was forced to run from justice. He saved his money, em- 
braced Arianism, collected a library, and got promoted by 
a faction to the episcopal throne of Alexandria. When 
Julian came, a.d. 361, George was dragged to prison; the 
prison was burst open by the mob, and George was lynched, 
as he deserved. And 'this precious knave became, in good 
time, Saint George of England, patron of chivalry, emblem 
of victory and civility, and the pride of the best blood of 
the modern world. 

Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should de- 
rive from an impostor. Strange, that the New World 
should have no better luck, — that broad America must wear 
the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer 
at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, 
and whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate in an 
expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world 
to supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his 
own dishonest name. Thus nobody can throw stones. We 
are equally badly off in our founders; and the false pickle- 
dealer is an offset to the false bacon-seller. 



CHAPTER X 

WEALTH 

There is no country in which so absolute a homage is 
paid to wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame when 
a man exhibits the evidences of large property, as if, after 
all, it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride 
in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse 
logic rules throughout all English souls; — if you have merit, 



408 ENGLISH TRAITS 

can you not show it by your good clothes, and coach and 
horses? How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe of 
wine? 

Haydon says, " There is a fierce resolution to make 
every man live according to the means he possesses." There 
is a mixture of religion in it. .They are under the Jewish 
law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days shall 
be long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, 
flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion, is 
the reproach of poverty. They do not wish to be repre- 
sented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has 
lost his fortune, is said to have died of a broken heart. The 
last term of insult is, "a beggar." Nelson said, " The want 
of fortune is a crime which I can never get over." Sydney 
Smith said, " Poverty is infamous in England." And one 
of their recent writers speaks, in reference to a private and 
scholastic life, of " the grave moral deterioration which 
follows an empty exchequer." You shall find this sentiment, 
if not so frankly put, yet deeply implied, in the novels and 
romances of the present century, and not only in these, but 
in biography, and in the votes of public assemblies, in the 
tone of the preaching, and in the table-talk. 

I was lately turning over Wood's Athence Oxonienses, 
and looking naturally for another standard in a chronicle 
of the scholars of Oxford for two hundred years. But I 
found the two disgraces in that, as in most English books, 
are, first, disloyalty to Church and State, and, second, 
to be born poor, or to come to poverty. A natural fruit of 
England is the brutal political economy. Malthus finds no 
cover laid at nature's table for the laborer's son. In 1809, 
the majority in Parliament expressed itself by the language 
of Mr. Fuller in the House of Commons, " If you do 
not like the country, damn you, you can leave it." When 
Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish officers 
to bind children apprentices at a greater distance than forty 
miles from their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, 
" Though in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affections 
was a good thing, 'twas not so among the lower orders. 
Better take them away from those who might deprave 
them. And it was highly injurious to trade to stop binding 



WEALTH 409 

to manufactures, as it must raise the price of labor, and of 
manufactured goods." 

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only 
by the respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of art 
of the Saxon, as he is a wealth-maker, and his passion for 
independence. The Englishman believes that ' every man 
must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, if he 
do not mend his condition. To pay their debts is their 
national point of honor. From the Exchequer and the East 
India House to the huckster's shop, everything prospers, be- 
cause it is solvent. The British armies are solvent, and pay 
for what they take. The British Empire is solvent; for, 
in spite of the huge national debt, the valuation mounts. 
During the war from 1789 to 181 5, whilst they complained 
that they were taxed within an inch of their lives, and, 
by dint of enormous taxes, were subsidizing all the con- 
tinent against France, the English were growing rich every 
year faster than any people ever grew before. It is their 
maxim, that the weight of taxes must be calculated not by 
what is taken, but by what is left. Solvency is in the ideas 
and mechanism of an Englishman. The Crystal Palace 
is not considered honest until it pays ; — no matter how much 
convenience, beauty, or eclat, it must be self-supporting. 
They are contented with slower steamers, as long as they 
know the swifter boats lose money. They proceed logically 
by the double method of labor and thrift. Every household 
exhibits an exact economy, and nothing of that uncalculated 
headlong expenditure which families use in America. If 
they cannot pay, they do not buy; for they have no pre- 
sumption of better fortunes next year, as our people have ; 
and they say without shame, I cannot afford it. Gentlemen 
do not hesitate to ride in the second-class cars, or in the 
second cabin. An economist, or a man who can proportion 
his means and his ambition, or bring the year round with 
expenditure which expresses his character, without em- 
barrassing one day of his future, is already a master of 
life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his son, " that 
one ought never to devote more than two-thirds of his 
income to the ordinary expenses of life, since the extraor- 
dinary will be certain to absorb the other third." 



410 ENGLISH TRAITS 

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability, 
government becomes a manufacturing corporation, and 
every house a mill. The headlong bias to utility will let 
no talent lie in a napkin, — if possible, will teach spiders 
to weave silk stockings. An Englishman, while he eats 
and drinks no more, or not much more, than another man, 
labors three times as many hours in the course of a year 
as any other European; or his life as a workman is three 
lives. He works fast. Everything in England is at a quick 
pace. They have reinforced their own productivity by the 
creation of that marvellous machinery which differences this 
age from any other age. 

'Tis a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of 
the machine-shop. Six hundred years ago Roger Bacon 
explained trie precession of the equinoxes, the consequent 
necessity of the reform of the calendar; measured the length 
of the year, invented gunpowder; and announced (as if 
looking from his lofty cell, over five centuries, into ours), 
" that machines can be constructed to drive ships more 
rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do; nor would 
they need anything but a pilot to steer them. Carriages 
also might be constructed to move with an incredible speed, 
without the aid of any animal. Finally, it would not be 
impossible to make machines which, by means of a suit 
of wings, should fly in the air in the manner of birds." But 
the secret slept with Bacon. The six hundred years have 
not yet fulfilled his words. Two centuries ago the sawing 
of timber was done by hand ; the carriage wheels ran on 
wooden axles; the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And 
it was to little purpose that they had pit-coal, or that looms 
were improved, unless Watt and Stephenson had taught 
them to work force-pumps and power-looms by steam. The 
great strides were all taken within the last hundred years. 
The Life of Sir Robert Peel, who died the other day, the 
model Englishman, very properly has for a frontispiece a 
drawing of the spinning- jenny, which wove the web of his 
fortunes. Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny, and died 
in a workhouse. Arkwright improved the invention; and 
the machine dispensed with the work of ninety-nine men: 
that is, one spinner could do as much work as one hundred 



WEALTH 411 

had done before. The loom was improved further. But 
the men would sometimes strike for wages, and combine 
against the masters, and, about 1829-30, much fear was 
felt, lest the trade would be drawn away by these interrupt- 
ions, and the emigration of the spinners to Belgium and 
the United States. Iron and steel are very obedient. 
Whether it were not possible to make a spinner that would 
not rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor 
emigrate? At the solicitation of the masters, after a mob 
and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts, of Manchester, un- 
dertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of the quar- 
relsome fellow God had made. After a few trials he 
succeeded, and in 1830 procured a patent for his self-acting 
mule ; a creation the delight of mill-owners, and " destined," 
they said, " to restore order among the industrious classes ; " 
a machine requiring only a child's hand to piece the broken 
yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed domestic spinning, so 
Roberts destroyed the factory spinner. The power of 
machinery in Great Britain, in mills, has been computed 
to be equal to 600,000,000 men, one man being able by the 
aid of steam to do the work which required two hundred and 
fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago. The production has 
been commensurate. England already had this laborious 
race, rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and favorable climate. 
Eight hundred years ago commerce had made it rich, and 
it was recorded, " England is the richest of all the northern 
nations." The Norman historians recite that, "in 1067, 
William carried with him into Normandy, from England, 
more gold and silver than had ever before been seen in 
Gaul." But when to this labor and trade and these native 
resources was added this goblin of steam, with his myriad 
arms, never tired, working night and day everlastingly, the 
amassing of property has run out of all figures. It makes 
the motor of the last ninety years. The steampipe has 
added to her population and wealth the equivalent of four 
or five Englands. Forty thousand ships are entered in 
Lloyd's lists. The yield of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 
quarters in the time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854. A 
thousand million of pounds sterling are said to compose the 
floating money of commerce. In 1848 Lord John Russell stated 



412 ENGLISH TRAITS 

that the people of this country had laid out £300,000,000 of 
capital in railways in the last four years. But a better 
measure than these sounding figures is the estimate that 
there is wealth enough in England to support the entire 
population in idleness for one year. 

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, 
roads, locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar 
to a millionth of an inch. Steam twines huge cannon into 
wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies with the 
volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It can clothe 
shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that 
will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it can plant forests, 
and bring rain after three thousand years. Already it is 
ruddering the balloon, and the next war will be fought in 
the air. But another machine more potent in England than 
steam, is the Bank. It votes an issue of bills, population is 
stimulated, and cities rise; it refuses loans, and emigration 
empties the country; trade sinks; revolutions break out; 
kings are dethroned. By these new agents our social system 
is moulded. By dint of steam and of money, war and com- 
merce are changed. Nations have lost their old omnipotence ; 
the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, 
we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to 
choose what law they will live under. Money makes place 
for them. The telegraph is a limp-band that will hold the 
Fenris-wolf of war. For now that a telegraph line runs 
through France and Europe, from London, every message 
it transmits makes stronger by one thread the band which 
war will have to cut. 

The introduction of these elements gives new resources 
to existing proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that 
the state depends on the House of Lords, but the engineer 
sees that every stroke of the steam-piston gives value to 
the duke's land, fills it with tenants; doubles, quadruples, 
centuples the duke's capital, and creates new measures and 
new necessities for the. culture of his children. Of course, 
it draws the nobility into the competition as stockholders in 
the mine, the canal, the railway, in the application of steam 
to agriculture, and sometimes into trade. But it also intro- 
duces large classes into the same competition; the old energy 



WEALTH 413 

of the Norse race arms itself with these magnificent powers ; ^ 
new men prove an overmatch for the land-owner, and the 
mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor, who once 
forged his bolts in icy Hecla and built galleys by lonely 
fiords, in England has advanced with the times, has shorn 
his beard, enters Parliament, sits down at a desk in the India 
House, and lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam- 
hammer. 

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years 
is a main fact in modern history. The wealth of London 
determines prices all over the globe. All things precious, 
or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are sucked into this 
commerce and floated to London. Some English private 
fortunes reach, and some exceed, a million of dollars a year. 
A hundred thousand palaces adorn the island. All that can 
feed the senses and passions, all that can succor the talent, 
or arm the hands, of the intelligent middle class, who never 
spare in what they buy for their own consumption; all that 
can aid science, gratify taste, or soothe comfort, is in open 
market. Whatever is excellent and beautiful in civil, rural, 
or ecclesiastic architecture ; in fountain, garden, or grounds ; 
the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy 
at home. The taste and science of thirty peaceful genera- 
tions; the gardens which Evelyn planted; the temples and 
pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren 
built ; the wood that Gibbons carved ; the taste of foreign and 
domestic artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, 
are in the vast auction, and the hereditary principle heaps 
on the owner of to-day the benefit of ages of owners. The 
present possessors are to the full as absolute as any of 
their fathers, in choosing and procuring what they like. 
This comfort and splendor, the breadth of lake and mountain, 
tillage, pasture, and park, sumptuous castle and modern villa, 
— all consist with perfect order. They have no revolutions ; 
no horse-guards dictating to the crown ; no Parisian pois- 
sardes and barricades; no mob: but drowsy habitude, daily 
dress-dinners, wine, and ale, and beer, and gin, and sleep. 

With this power of creation, and this passion for inde- 
pendence, property has reached an ideal perfection. It is 
felt and treated as the national life-blood. The laws are 



414 ENGLISH TRAITS 

framed to give property the securest possible basis, and the 
provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cun- 
ningest heads in a profession which never admits a fool. 
The rights of property nothing but felony and treason can 
override. The house is a castle which the king cannot enter. 
The Bank is a strong box to which the king has no key. 
Whatever surly sweetness possession can give, is tested in 
England to the dregs. Vested rights are awful things, and 
absolute possession gives the smallest freeholder identity 
of interest with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked 
garden-gates announce the absolute will of the owner to 
be alone. Every whim of exaggerated egotism is put into 
stone and iron, into silver and gold, with costly deliberation 
and detail. 

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes 
to establish some claim to put her park paling a rod for- 
ward into his grounds, so as to get a coachway, and save her 
a mile to the avenue. Instantly he transforms his paling 
into stone-masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all 
Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or compound for an 
inch of the land. They delight in a freak as the proof of 
their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic 
Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice of incomparable pros- 
pect, built a house like a long barn, which had not a window 
on the prospect side. Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole, 
Fonthill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks ; and Newstead 
Abbey became one in the hands of Lord Byron. 

But the proudest result of this creation has been the great 
and refined forces it has put at the disposal of the private 
citizen. In the social world, an Englishman to-day has the 
best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He goes with the 
most powerful protection, keeps the best company, is armed 
by the best education, is seconded by wealth; and his En- 
glish name and accidents are like a flourish of trumpets an- 
nouncing him. This, with his quiet style of manners, gives 
him the power of a sovereign, without the inconveniences 
which belong to that rank. I must prefer the condition of 
an English gentleman of the better class, to that of any 
potentate in Europe, — whether for travel, or for opportunity 
of society, or for access to means of science or study, or 



WEALTH 415 

for mere comfort and: easy healthy relation to people at 
home. 

Such as we have seen is the wealth of England, a mighty 
mass, and made good in whatever details we care to explore. 
The cause and spring of it is the wealth of temperament in 
the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. 
Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as them- 
selves; each is a captain a hundred strong, and that wealth 
of men is represented again in the faculty of each individual, 
— that he has waste strength, power to spare. The English 
are so rich, and seem to have established a tap-root in the 
bowels of the planet, because they are constitutionally fertile 
and creative. 

But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would 
not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is 
ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, 
adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and 
leather, to some required function in the work of the world. 
But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What 
he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power. There 
should be temperance in making cloth, as well as in eating. 
A man should not be a silk-worm, nor a nation a tent of 
caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the 
mills to the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester 
spinner, — far on the way to be spiders and needles. The in- 
cessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, 
robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin- 
polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and pres- 
ently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed 
like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoe-strings supersedes 
buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen, or railways 
of turnpikes, or when commons are inclosed by landlords. 
Then society is admonished of the mischief of the division 
of labor, and that the best political economy is care and cul- 
ture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such 
as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new 
choice and the application of their talent to new labor. 
Then again come in new calamities. England is aghast at 
the disclosure of her fraud in the adulteration of food, of 
drugs, and of almost every fabric in her mills and shops; 



416 ENGLISH TRAITS 

finding that milk will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor 
bread satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. 
In true England all is false and forged. This too is the re- 
action of machinery, but of the larger machinery of com- 
merce. 'Tis not, I suppose, want of probity, so much as the 
tyranny of trade, which necessitates a perpetual competition 
of underselling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of 
the fabric. 

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, 
and flies away with the aeronaut. Steam, from the first, hissed 
and screamed to warn him ; it was dreadful with its explosion, 
and crushed the engineer. The machinist has wrought and 
watched, engineers and firemen without number have been 
sacrificed in learning to tame and guide the monster. But 
harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, 
with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, 
Pitt, Peel, and Robinson, and their Parliaments, and their 
whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their 
graves in the belief that they were enriching the country 
which they were impoverishing. They congratulated each 
other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find a merchant 
who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise 
or fall, or who knows the mischief of paper money. In the 
culmination of national prosperity, in the annexation of 
countries; building of ships, depots, towns; in the influx of 
tons of gold and silver; amid the chuckle of chancellors and 
financiers, it was found that bread rose to famine prices, that 
the yeoman was forced to sell his cow and pig, his tools, 
and his acre of land; and the dreadful barometer of the 
poor-rates was touching the point of ruin. The poor-rate 
was sucking in the solvent classes, and forcing an exodus 
of farmers and mechanics. What befalls from the violence 
of financial crisis, befalls daily in the violence of artificial 
legislation. 

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous, 
and augmenting. But the question recurs, does she take the 
step beyond, namely, to the wise use, in view of the supreme 
wealth of nations? We estimate the wisdom of nations by 
seeing what they did with their surplus capital. And, in 
view of these injuries, some compensation has been attempted 



ARISTOCRACY 417 

in England. A part of the money earned returns to the 
brain to buy schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers, chem- 
ists, and artists with ; and a part to repair the wrongs of this 
intemperate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics' 
Institutes, public grounds, and other charities and amenities. 
But the antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil re- 
quires a deeper cure, which time and a simpler social organ- 
ization must supply. At present, she does not rule her 
wealth. She is simply a good England, but no divinity, or 
wise and instructed soul. She too is in the stream of fate, 
one victim more in a common catastrophe. 

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness 
to be held as the chief offender. England must be held re- 
sponsible for the despotism of expense. Her prosperity, the 
splendor which so much manhood and talent and persever- 
ance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the very argument 
of materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of base 
wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and wisdom, 
when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and 
arts; when English success has grown out of the very re- 
nunciation of principles, and the dedication to outsides? A 
civility of trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of sen- 
sation takes place, and the putting as many impediments 
as we can, between the man and his objects. Hardly the 
bravest among them have the manliness to resist it success- 
fully. Hence, it has come that not the aims of a manly life, 
but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is 
that which is to be considered by a youth in England, emerg- 
ing from his minority*' A large family is reckoned a mis- 
fortune. And it is a consolation in the death of the young, 
that a source of expense is closed. 



CHAPTER XI 

ARISTOCRACY 

The feudal character of the English state, now that 
it is getting obsolete, glares a little, in contrast with the demo- 
cratic tendencies. The inequality of power and property shocks 



418 ENGLISH TRAITS 

republican nerves. Palaces, halls, villas, walled parks, all 
over England, rival the splendor of royal seats. Many of 
the halls, like Haddon, or Kedleston, are beautiful desolations. 
The proprietor never saw them, or never lived in them. 
Primogeniture built these sumptuous piles, and, I suppose, 
it is the sentiment of every traveller, as it was mine, 'Twas 
well to come ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardi- 
nal rule of English property and institutions. Laws, cus- 
toms, manners, the very persons and faces, affirm it. 

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the people 
is loyal. The estates, names, and manners of the nobles flat- 
ter the fancy of the people, and conciliate the necessary 
support. In spite of broken faith, stolen charters, and the. 
devastation of society by the profligacy of the court, we take 
sides as # we read for the loyal England and King Charles's 
" return to his right " with his Cavaliers, — knowing what 
a heartless trifler he is, and what a crew of God-forsaken 
robbers they are. The people of England knew as much. 
But the fair idea of a settled government connecting itself 
with heraldic names, with the written and oral history of 
Europe, and, at last, with the Hebrew religion, and the oldest 
traditions of the world, was too pleasing a vision to be shat- 
tered by a few offensive realities, and the politics of shoe- 
makers and costermongers. The hopes of the commoners 
take the same direction with the interest of the patricians. 
Every man who becomes rich buys land, and does what he 
can to fortify the nobility, into which he hopes to rise. 
The Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. 
Time and law have made the joining and moulding perfect 
in every part. The Cathedrals, the Universities, the national 
music, the popular romances, conspire to uphold the heraldry, 
which the current politics of the day are sapping. The 
taste of the people is conservative. They are proud of the 
castles, and of the language and symbol of chivalry. Even 
the word lord is the luckiest style that is used in any lan- 
guage to designate a patrician. The superior education and 
manners of the nobles recommend them to the country. 

The Norwegian pirate got what he could, and held it for 
his eldest son. The Norman noble, who was the Norwegian 
pirate baptized, did likewise. There was this advantage of 



ARISTOCRACY 419 

western over oriental nobility, that this was recruited from 
below. English history is aristocracy with the doors open. 
Who has courage and faculty, let him come in. Of course, 
the terms of admission to this club are hard and high. The 
selfishness of the nobles comes in aid of the interest of the 
nation to require signal merit. Piracy and war gave place 
to trade, politics, and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; 
the law-lord to the merchant and the mill-owner; but the 
privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining it were 
changed. 

The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian 
exploits by sea, and Saxon sturdiness on land. All nobility 
in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority. The 
things these English have done were not done without peril 
of life, nor without wisdom and conduct ; and the first hands, 
it may be presumed, were often challenged to show their 
right to their honors, or yield them to better men. " He 
that will be a head, let him be a bridge," said the Welsh 
chief Benegridran, when he carried all his men over the 
river on his back. " He shall have the book," said the 
mother of Alfred, " who can read it ;" and Alfred won it by 
that title : and I make no doubt that feudal tenure was no 
sinecure, but baron, knight, and tenant often had their mem- 
ories refreshed, in regard to the service by which they held 
their lands. The De Veres, Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plantag- 
enets were not addicted to contemplation. The Middle Age 
adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of 
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the Emperor told 
Henry V. that no Christian king had such another knight 
for wisdom, nurture, and manhood, and caused him to be 
named, " Father of curtesie." " Our success in France," 
says the historian, " lived and died with him." 1 

The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation of land 
was large, as long as it brought the duty of protecting it, 
hour by hour, against a terrible enemy. In France and in 
England, the nobles were, down to a late day, born and bred 
to war: and the duel, which in peace still held them to the 
risks of war, diminished the envy that, in trading and 
studious nations, would else have pried into their title. 

1 Fuller's Worthies, II., p. 472. 



420 ENGLISH TRAITS 

They were looked on as men who played high for a great 
stake. 

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept 
great. A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. In 
the same line of Warwick, the successor next but one to 
Beauchamp, was the stout earl of Henry VI. and Edward IV. 
Few esteemed themselves in the mode, whose heads were not 
adorned with the black ragged staff, his badge. At his 
house in London, six oxen were daily eaten at a breakfast; 
and every tavern was full of his meat; and who had any 
acquaintance in his family, should have as much boiled and 
roast as he could carry on a long dagger. 

The new age brings new qualities into request, the virtues 
of pirates gave way to those of planters, merchants, senators, 
and scholars. Comity, social talent, and fine manners, no 
doubt, have had their part also. I have met somewhere with 
a historiette, which, whether more or less true in its par- 
ticulars, carries a general truth. " How came the Duke of 
Bedford by his great landed estates? His ancestor having 
travelled on the continent, a lively, pleasant man, became the 
companion of a foreign prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire 
coast, where Mr. Russell lived. The prince recommended 
him to Henry VIII., who, liking his company, gave him a 
large share of the plundered church lands." 

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent from 
the Norman, and has never worked for eight hundred years. 
But the fact is otherwise. Where is Bohun? where is De 
Vere? The lawyer, the farmer, the silkmercer lies perdu 
under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say noth- 
ing; especially skilful lawyers, nobody's sons, who did some 
piece of work at a nice moment for government, and were 
rewarded with ermine. 

The national tastes of the English do not lead them to the 
life of the courtier, but to secure the comfort and independ- 
ence of their homes. The aristocracy are marked by their 
predilection for country-life. They are called the county- 
families. They have often no residence in London, and only 
go thither a short time, during the season, to see the opera ; 
but they concentrate the love and labor of many generations 
on the building, planting, and decoration of their homesteads. 






ARISTOCRACY 421 

Some of them are too old and too proud to wear titles, or, 
as Sheridan said to Coke, " disdain to hide their head in a 
coronet " ; and some curious examples are cited to show the 
stability of English families. Their proverb is that, fifty 
miles from London, a family will last a hundred years ; at a 
hundred miles, two hundred years; and so on; but I doubt 
that steam, the enemy of time, as well as of space, will dis- 
turb these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of the first 
Duke of Buckingham, " He was born at Brookeby in Leices- 
tershire, where his ancestors had chiefly continued about 
the space of four hundred years, rather without obscurity, 
than with any great lustre." 2 Wraxall says that, in 178 1, 
Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, told him that 
when the year 1783 should arrive, he meant to give a grand 
festival to all the descendants of the body of Jockey of 
Norfolk, to mark the day when the dukedom should have re- 
mained three hundred years in their house, since its creation 
by Richard III. Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl Ox- 
ford, in 1666, that the honor had now remained in that 
name and blood six hundred years. 

This long descent of families and this cleaving through 
ages to the same spot of ground captivates the imagination. 
It has too a connection with the names of the towns and 
districts of the country. 

The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of legendary 
melody spread over the land. Older than all epics and his- 
tories, which clothe a nation, this under-shirt sits close to 
the body. What history too, and what stores of primitive 
and savage observation, it infolds ! Cambridge is the bridge 
of the Cam; Sheffield the field of the river Sheaf; Leicester 
the castra or camp of the Lear or Leir (now Soar) ; Roch- 
dale, of the Roch; Exeter or Excester, the castra of the Ex; 
Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the mouths of 
the Ex, Dart, Sid, and Teign rivers. Waltham is strong 
town ; Radcliff e is red cliff ; and so on : — a sincerity and use 
in naming very striking to an American, whose country is 
whitewashed all over by unmeaning names, the cast-off 
clothes of the country from which its emigrants came; or, 
named at a pinch from a psalm-tune. But the English are 

3 Reliquiae Wottonianse, p. 208. 

AA HCV 



422 ENGLISH TRAITS 

those " barbarians " of Jamblichus, who " are stable in their 
manners, and firmly continue to employ the same words, 
which also are dear to the gods." 

'Tis an old sneer, that the Irish peerage drew their names 
from playbooks. The English lords do not call their lands 
after their own names, but call themselves after their lands, 
as if the man represented the country that bred him; and 
they rightly wear the token of the glebe that gave them 
birth; suggesting that the tie is not cut, but that there in 
London, — the crags of Argyle, the kail of Cornwall, the 
downs of Devon, the iron of Wales, the clays of Stafford, are 
neither forgetting nor forgotten, but know the man who was 
born by them, and who, like the long line of his fathers, has 
carried that crag, that shore, dale, fen, or woodland, in his 
blood and manners. It has, too, the advantage of suggesting 
responsibleness. A susceptible man could not wear a name 
which represented in a strict sense a city or a county of 
England, without hearing in it a challenge to duty and 
honor. 

The predilection of the patricians for residence in the 
country, combined with the degree of liberty possessed by 
the peasant, makes the safety of the English hall. Mirabeau 
wrote prophetically from England, in 1784, " If revolution 
break out in France, I tremble for the aristocracy: their 
chateaux will be reduced to ashes, and their blood spilt in 
torrents. The English tenant would defend his lord to the 
last extremity." The English go to their estates for 
grandeur. The French live at court, and exile themselves 
to their estates for economy. As they do not mean to live 
with their tenants, they do not conciliate them, but wring 
from them the last sous. Evelyn writes from Blois, in 1644, 
" The wolves are here in such numbers, that they often 
come and take children out of the streets: yet will not the 
Duke, who is sovereign here, permit them to be destroyed." 

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families, the 
traveller is shown the palaces in Piccadilly, Burlington 
House, Devonshire House, Lansdowne House in Berkshire 
Square, and, lower down in the city, a few noble houses 
which still withstand in all their amplitude the encroachment 
of streets. The Duke of Bedford includes or included a 



ARISTOCRACY 423 

mile square in the heart of London, where the British 
Museum, once Montague House, now stands, and the land 
occupied by Woburn Square, Bedford Square, Russell Square. 
The Marquis of Westminster built within a few years the 
series of squares called Belgravia. Stafford House is the 
noblest palace in London. Northumberland House holds its 
place by Charing Cross. Chesterfield House remains in Aud- 
ley Street. Sion House and Holland House are in the 
suburbs. But most of the historical houses are masked or 
lost in the modern uses to which trade or charity has con- 
verted them. A multitude of town palaces contain inesti- 
mable galleries of art. 

In the country, the size of private estates is more im- 
pressive. From Barnard Castle I rode on the highway 
twenty-three miles from High Force, a fall of the Tees, 
towards Darlington, past Raby Castle, through the estate of 
the Duke of Cleveland. The Marquis of Breadalbane rides 
out of his house a hundred miles in a straight line to the 
sea, on his own property. The Duke of Sutherland owns the 
county of Sutherland, stretching across Scotland from sea 
to sea. The Duke of Devonshire, besides his other estates, 
owns 96,000 acres in the County of Derby. The Duke of 
Richmond has 40,000 acres at Goodwood, and 300,000 at 
Gordon Castle. The Duke of Norfolk's park in Sussex is 
fifteen miles in circuit. An agriculturist bought lately the 
island of Lewes, in Hebrides, containing 500,000 acres. The 
possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight seats in 
Parliament. This is the Heptarchy again: and before the 
Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four persons sent 
three hundred and seven members to Parliament. The 
borough-mongers governed England. 

These large domains are growing larger. The great es- 
tates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the soil of 
England was owned by 250,000 corporations and proprietors ; 
and, in 1822, by 32,000. These broad estates find room in 
this narrow island. All over England, scattered at short 
intervals among ship-yards, mills, mines, and forges, are the 
paradises of the nobles, where the livelong repose and re- 
finement are heightened by the contrast with the roar of 
industry and necessity, out of which you have stepped aside. 



424 ENGLISH TRAITS 

I was surprised to observe the very small attendance 
usually in the House of Lords. Out of 573 peers, on ordi- 
nary days, only twenty or thirty. Where are they? I asked. 
" At home on their estates, devoured by ennui, or in the Alps, 
or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains, or in Egypt, or in 
India, on the Ghauts." But, with such interests at stake, how 
can these men afford to neglect them? "Oh," replied my 
friend, " why should they work for themselves, when every 
man in England works for them, and will suffer before they 
come to harm ? " The hardest radical instantly uncovers, 
and changes his tone to a lord. It was remarked, on the 
10th April, 1848 (the day of the Chartist demonstration), 
that the upper classes were, for the first time, actively in- 
teresting themselves in their own defence, and men of rank 
were sworn special constables, with the rest. " Besides, why 
need they sit out the debate ? Has not the Duke of Welling- 
ton, at this moment, their proxies, — the proxies of fifty peers 
in his pocket, to vote for them, if there be an emergency ? " 

It is however true, that the existence of the House of 
Peers as a branch of the government entitles them to fill half 
the Cabinet; and their weight of property and station gives 
them a virtual nomination of the other half ; whilst they have 
their share in the subordinate offices, as a school of training. 
This monopoly of political power has given them their intel- 
lectual and social eminence in Europe. A few law lords and 
a few political lords take the brunt of public business. In the 
army, the nobility fill a large part of the high commissions, 
and give to these a tone of expense and splendor, and also of 
exclusiveness. They have borne their full share of duty and 
danger in this service; and there are few noble families 
which have not paid in some of their members, the debt of 
life or limb, in the sacrifices of the Russian war. For the 
rest, the nobility have the lead in matters of state, and of 
expense; in questions of taste, in social usages, in convivial 
and domestic hospitalities. In general, all that is required 
of them is to sit securely, to preside at public meetings, to 
countenance charities, and to give the example of that de- 
corum so dear to the British heart. 

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what service 
this class have rendered? — uses appear, or they would have 



ARISTOCRACY 425 

perished long ago. Some of these are easily enumerated, 
others more subtle make a part of unconscious history. 
Their institution is one step in the progress of society. For 
a race yields a nobility in some form, however we name the 
lords, as surely as it yields women. 

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, 
born to wealth and power, who have run through every 
country, and kept in every country the best company, have 
seen every secret of art and nature, and, when men of any 
ability or ambition, have been consulted in the conduct of 
every important action. You cannot wield great agencies 
without lending yourself to them, and, when it happens that 
the spirit of the earl meets his rank and duties, we have the 
best examples of behavior. Power of any kind readily ap- 
pears in the manners ; and beneficent power, le talent de bien 
faire, gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or resisted. 

These people seem to gain as much as they lose by their 
position. They survey society as from the top of St. Paul's, 
and, if they never hear plain truth from men, they see the 
best of everything, in every kind, and they see things so 
grouped and amassed as to infer easily the sum and genius, 
instead of tedious particularities. Their good behavior de- 
serves all its fame, and they have that simplicity, and that 
air of repose, which are the finest ornament of greatness. 

The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, and 
not thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and 'tis wonder- 
ful how much talent runs into manners : — nowhere and never 
so much as in England. They have the sense of superiority, 
the absence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in the 
aspiring classes, a pure tone of thought and feeling, and 
the power of command, among their other luxuries, the 
presence of the most accomplished men in their festive 
meetings. 

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear the 
laws as ornaments, and walk by their faith in their painted 
May-Fair, as if among the forms of gods. The economist 
if 1855 who asks, of what use are the lords? may learn of 
Franklin to ask, of what use is a baby? They have been a 
social church proper to inspire sentiments mutually honor- 
ing the lover and the loved. Politeness is the ritual of so- 



426 ENGLISH TRAITS 

ciety, as prayers are of the church ; a school of manners, and 
a gentle blessing to the age in which it grew. 'Tis a romance 
adorning English life with a larger horizon; a midway 
heaven, fulfilling to their sense their fairy tales and poetry. 
This, just as far as the breeding of the nobleman really made 
him brave, handsome, accomplished, and great-hearted. 

On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners, or 
to finish men, has a great value. Every one who has tasted 
the delight of friendship, will respect every social guard 
which our manners can establish, tending to secure from 
the intrusion of frivolous and distasteful people. The jeal- 
ousy of every class to guard itself, is a testimony to the 
reality they have found in life. When a man once knows 
that he has done justice to himself, let him dismiss all ter- 
rors of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as he is concerned. 
He who keeps the door of a mine, whether of cobalt, or 
mercury, or nickel, or plumbago, securely knows that the 
world cannot do without him. Everybody who is real is 
open and ready for that which is also real. 

Besides, these are they who make England that strong-box 
and museum it is ; who gather and protect works of art, 
dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary coun- 
tries, and brought hither out of all the world. I look with 
respect at houses six, seven, eight hundred, or, like Warwick 
Castle, nine hundred years old. I pardoned high park- 
fences, when I saw that, besides does and pheasants, these 
have preserved Arundel marbles, Townley galleries, Howard 
and Spenserian libraries, Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon 
manuscripts, monastic architectures, millennial trees, and 
breeds of cattle elsewhere extinct. In these manors, after 
the frenzy of war and destruction subsides a little, the anti- 
quary finds the frailest Roman jar, or crumbling Egyptian 
mummy-case, without so much as a new layer of dust, keep- 
ing the series of history unbroken, and waiting for its in- 
terpreter, who is sure to arrive. These lords are the treasur- 
ers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their pride and 
wealth to this function. 

Yet there were other works for British dukes to do. 
George Loudon, Quintinye, Evelyn, had taught them to make 
gardens. Arthur Young, Bakewell, and Mechi have made 



ARISTOCRACY 427 

them agricultural. Scotland was a camp until the day of 
Culloden. The Dukes of Athol, Sutherland, Buccleugh, and 
the Marquis of Breadalbane have introduced the rape-cul- 
ture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, the plantation of 
forests, the artificial replenishment of lakes and ponds with 
fish, the renting of game-preserves. Against the' cry of the 
old tenantry, and the sympathetic cry of the English press, 
they have rooted out and planted anew, and now six millions 
of people live, and live better, on the same land that fed 
three millions. 

The English barons, in every period, have been brave and 
great, after the estimate and opinion of their times. The 
grand old halls scattered up and down in England are dumb 
vouchers to the state and broad hospitality of their ancient 
lords. Shakespeare's portraits of good duke Humphrey, of 
Warwick, of Northumberland, of Talbot, were- drawn in 
strict consonance with the traditions. A sketch of the Earl 
of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen Elizabeth's Arch- 
bishop Parker; 3 Lord Herbert of Cherbury's autobiography; 
the letters and essays of Sir Philip Sidney; the anecdotes 
preserved by the antiquaries Fuller and Collins; some 
glimpses at the interiors of noble houses, which we owe to 
Pepys and Evelyn; the details which Ben Jonson's masques 
(performed at Kenilworth, Althrope, Belvoir, and other 
noble houses) record or suggest; down to Aubrey's passages 
of the life of Hobbes in the house of the Earl of Devon, are 
favorable pictures of a romantic style of manners. Pens- 
hurst still shines for us, and its Christmas revels, " where logs 
not burn, but men." At Wilton House the "Arcadia" was 
written, amidst conversations with Fulke Greville, Lord 
Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind, as his own poems declare 
him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an honest house, for which 
Milton's " Comus " was written, and the company nobly bred 
which performed it with knowledge and sympathy. In the 
roll of nobles are found poets, philosophers, chemists, as- 
tronomers, also men of solid virtues and of lofty sentiments ; 
often they have been the friends and patrons of genius and 
learning and especially of the fine arts; and at this moment 
almost every great house has its sumptuous picture-gallery. 

3 Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, vol. i, xii. 



428 ENGLISH TRAITS 

Of course, there is another side to this gorgeous show. 
Every victory was the defeat of a party only less worthy. 
Castles are proud things, but 'tis safest to be outside of 
them. War is a foul game, and yet war is not the worst part 
. of aristocratic history. In later times, when the baron, 
educated only for war, with his brains paralyzed by his 
stomach, found himself idle at home, he grew fat and wanton, 
and a sorry brute. Grammont, Pepys, and Evelyn show the 
kennels to which the king and court went in quest of pleas- 
ure. Prostitutes taken from the theatres were made duch- 
esses, their bastards dukes and earls. " The young men sat 
uppermost, the old serious lords were out of favor." The 
discourse that the king's companions had with him was " poor 
and frothy." No man who valued his head might do what 
these pot-companions familiarly did with the king. In logical 
sequence of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell the beg- 
garly shifts to which the king was reduced, who could not 
find paper at his council table, and " no handkerchers " in 
his wardrobe, " and but three bands to his neck," and the 
linen-draper and the stationer were out of pocket, and re- 
fusing to trust him, and the baker will not bring bread any 
longer. Meantime the English Channel was swept and Lon- 
don threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned, too, by English 
sailors, who, having been cheated of their pay for years 
by the king, enlisted with the enemy. 

The Selwyn correspondence, in the reign of George III., 
discloses a rottenness in the aristocracy which threatened to 
decompose the state. The sycophancy -and sale of votes and 
honor for place and title; lewdness, gaming, smuggling, 
bribery, and cheating; the sneer at the childish indiscretion 
of quarrelling with ten thousand a year; the want of ideas; 
the splendor of the titles, and the apathy of the nation, are 
instructive, and make the reader pause and explore the 
firm bounds which confined these vices to a handful of rich 
men. In the reign of the Fourth George things do not seem 
to have mended, and the rotten debauchee let down from a 
window by an inclined plane into his coach to take the air, 
was a scandal to Europe which the ill fame of his queen and 
of his family did nothing to retrieve. 

Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the 



ARISTOCRACY 429 

Court is thought to have put a check on the gross vices of 
the aristocracy ; yet gaming, racing, drinking, and mistresses 
bring them down, and the democrat can still gather scandals 
if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying the gossip 
of the last generation of dukes served by bailiffs, with all 
their plate in pawn; of great lords living by the showing 
of their houses ; and of an old man wheeled in his chair from 
room to room, whilst his chambers are exhibited to the 
visitor for money; of ruined dukes and earls living in exile 
for debt. The historic names of the Buckinghams, Beau- 
forts, Marlboroughs, and Hertfords have gained no new 
lustre, and now and then darker scandals break out, ominous 
as the new chapters added under the Orleans dynasty to the 
" Causes Celebres " in France. Even peers who are men of 
worth and public spirit are overtaken and embarrassed by 
their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire, 
willing to be the Maecenas and Lucullus of his island, is 
reported to have said that he cannot live at Chatsworth but 
one month in the year. Their many houses eat them up. 
They cannot sell them, because they are entailed. They will 
not let them for pride's sake, but keep them empty, aired, 
and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of four or 
five thousand pounds a year. The spending is for a great 
part in servants, in many houses exceeding a hundred. 

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, 
because it squanders such vast power of benefit, has the 
mischief of crime. " They might be little Providences on 
earth," said my friend, " and they are, for the most part, 
jockeys and fops." Campbell says, " Acquaintance with the 
nobility, I could never keep up. It requires a life of idle- 
ness, dressing, and attendance on their parties." I suppose, 
too, that a feeling of self-respect is driving cultivated men 
out of this society, as if the noble were slow to receive the 
lessons of the times, and had not learned to disguise his 
pride of place. A man of wit, who is also one of the 
celebrities of wealth and fashion, confessed to his friend 
that he could not enter their houses without being made to 
feel that they were great lords, and he a low plebeian. With 
the tribe of artistes, including the musical tribe, the patrician 
morgue keeps no terms, but excludes them. When Julia 



430 ENGLISH TRAITS 

Grisi and Mario sang at the houses of the Duke of Welling- 
ton and other grandees, a cord was stretched between the 
singer and the company. 

When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully bred 
to great personal prowess. The education of a soldier is a 
simpler affair than that of an earl in the nineteenth century. 
And this was very seriously pursued; they were expert in 
every species of equitation, to the most dangerous practices, 
and this down to the accession of William of Orange. But 
graver men appear to have trained their sons for civil affairs. 
Elizabeth extended her thought to the future ; and Sir Philip 
Sidney in his letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, 
gave plain and hearty counsel. Already, too, the English 
noble and squire were preparing for the career of the coun- 
try-gentleman, and his peaceable expense. They went from 
city to city, learning receipts to make perfumes, sweet pow- 
ders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems, coins, and 
divers curiosities, preparing for a private life thereafter, in 
which they should take pleasure in these recreations. 

All advantages given to absolve the young patrician from 
intellectual labor are of course mistaken. " In the university, 
noblemen are exempted from the public exercises for the 
degree, &c, by which they attain a degree called honorary. 
At the same time, the fees they have to pay for matricula- 
tion, and on all other occasions, are much higher." 4 Fuller 
records " the observation of foreigners, that Englishmen, by 
making their children gentlemen, before they are men, cause 
they are so seldom wise men." This cockering justifies Dr. 
Johnson's bitter apology for primogeniture, " that it makes 
but one fool in a family." 

The revolution in society has reached this class. The 
great powers of industrial art have no exclusion of name or 
blood. The tools of our time, namely, steam, ships, printing, 
money, and popular education, belong to those who can 
handle them : and their effect has been that advantages once 
confined to men of family are now open to the whole middle 
class. The road that grandeur levels for his coach, toil can 
travel in his cart. 

This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true 

4 Huber. History of English Universities. 



ARISTOCRACY 431 

throughout English history. English history, wisely read, is 
the vindication of the brain of that people. Here, at last, 
were climate and condition friendly to the working faculty. 
Who now will work and dare, shall rule. This is the charter, 
or the chartism, which fogs, and seas, and rains proclaimed, 
— that intellect and personal force should make the law; that 
industry and administrative talent should administer; that 
work should wear the crown. I know that not this, but 
something else, is pretended. The fiction with which the 
noble and the bystander equally please themselves is that 
the former is of unbroken descent from the Norman, and so 
has never worked for eight hundred years. All the families 
are new, but the name is old, and they have made a cove- 
nant with their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis 
of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay and ex- 
tinction of old families, the continual recruiting of these 
from new blood. The doors, though ostentatiously guarded, 
are really open, and hence the power of the bribe. All the 
barriers to rank only whet the thirst, and enhance the prize. 
" Now," said Nelson, when clearing for battle, " a peerage, 
or Westminster Abbey ! " "I have no illusion left," said 
Sydney Smith, " but the Archbishop of Canterbury." " The 
lawyers," said Burke, " are only birds of passage in this 
House of Commons," and then added, with a new figure, 
" they have their best bower anchor in the House of Lords." 

Another stride that has been taken appears in the perish- 
ing of heraldry. Whilst the privileges of nobility are passing 
to the middle class, the badge is discredited, and the titles of 
lordship are getting musty and cumbersome. I wonder that 
sensible men have not been already impatient of them. They 
belong, with wigs, powder, and scarlet coats, to an earlier 
age, and may be advantageously consigned, with paint and 
tattoo, to the dignitaries of Australia and Polynesia. 

A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred 
into their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of 
fortune, are every day confronting the peers on a footing of 
equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race of honor 
and influence. That cultivated class is large and ever enlarg- 
ing. It is computed that, with titles and without, there are 
seventy thousand of these people coming and going in Lon- 



432 ENGLISH TRAITS 

don, who make up what is called high society. They cannot 
shut their eyes to the fact that an untitled nobility possess 
all the power without the inconveniences that belong to rank, 
and the rich Englishman goes over the world at the present 
day, drawing more than all the advantages which the strong- 
est of his kings could command. 



CHAPTER XII 

UNIVERSITIES 

Of British universities, Cambridge has the most illustrious 
names on its list. At the present day, too, it has the advan- 
tage of Oxford, counting in its alumni a greater number of 
distinguished scholars. I regret that I had but a single day 
wherein to see King's College Chapel, the beautiful lawns and 
gardens of the colleges, and a few of its gownsmen. 

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations to Ox- 
ford, where I had introductions to Dr. Daubeny, Professor 
of Botany, and to the Regius Professor of Divinity, as well 
as to a valued friend, a fellow of Oriel, and went thither on 
the last day of March, 1848. I was the guest of my friend 
in Oriel, was housed close upon that college, and I lived on 
college hospitalities. 

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the Bodleian 
Library, the Randolph Gallery, Merton Hall, and the rest. I 
saw several faithful high-minded young men, some of them 
in the mood of making sacrifices for peace of mind, — a topic, 
of course, on which I had no counsel to offer. Their affec- 
tionate and gregarious ways reminded me at once of the 
habits of our Cambridge men, though I imputed to these En- 
glish an advantage in their secure and polished manners. 
The halls are rich with oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The 
pictures of the founders hang from the walls; the tables 
glitter with plate. A youth came forward to the upper table, 
and pronounced the ancient form of grace before meals, 
which, I suppose, has been in use here for ages, Benedictus 
benedicat; benedicitur, benedicatur. 

It is a curious proof of the English use and wont, or of 



UNIVERSITIES 433 

their good nature, that these young men are locked up every 
night at nine o'clock, and the porter at each hall is required 
to give the name of any belated student who is admitted after 
that hour. Still more descriptive is the fact that out of 
twelve hundred young men, comprising the most spirited of 
the aristocracy, a duel has never occurred. 

Oxford is old, even in England, and conservative. Its 
foundations date from Alfred, and even from Arthur, if, as 
is alleged, the Pheryllt of the Druids had a seminary here. 
In the reign of Edward I., it is pretended, here were thirty 
thousand students ; and nineteen most noble foundations were 
then established. Chaucer found it as firm as if it had always 
stood; and it is, in British story, rich with great names, the 
school of the island, and the link of England to the learned 
of Europe. Hither came Erasmus, with delight, in 1497. 
Albericus Gentillis, in 1580, was relieved and maintained by 
the university. Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince of 
Sirad, who visited England to admire the wisdom of Queen 
Elizabeth, was entertained with stage-plays in the Refectory 
of Christ Church, in 1583. Isaac Casaubon, coming from 
Henri Quatre of France, by invitation of James I., was ad- 
mitted to Christ's College, in July, 1613. I saw the Ashmo- 
lean Museum, whither Elias Ashmole, in 1682, sent twelve 
cart-loads of rarities. Here indeed was the Olympia of all 
Anthony Wood's and Aubrey's games and heroes, and every 
inch of ground has its lustre. For Wood's Athencz Ox- 
onienses, or calender of the writers of Oxford for two hun- 
dred years, is a lively record of English manners and merits, 
and as much a national monument as Purchas's Pilgrims or 
Hansard's Register. On every side, Oxford is redolent of 
age and authority. Its gates shut of themselves against mod- 
ern innovation. It is still governed by the statutes of Arch- 
bishop Laud. The books in Merton Library are still chained 
to the wall. Here, on August 27, 1660, John Milton's Pro 
Popalo Anglican Defensio and Iconoclastes were com- 
mitted to the flames. I saw the school-court or quadrangle, 
where, in 1683, the Convocation caused the Leviathan of 
Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I do not know 
whether this learned body have yet heard of the declara- 
tion of American Independence, or whether the Ptolemaic 



434 ENGLISH TRAITS 

astronomy does not still hold its ground against the novelties 
of Copernicus. 

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It is usual 
for a nobleman, or indeed for almost every wealthy student, 
on quitting college, to leave behind him some article of plate; 
and gifts of all values, from a hall, or a fellowship, or a 
library, down to a picture or a spoon, are continually accru- 
ing, in the course of a century. My friend Doctor J. gave 
me the following anecdote. In Sir Thomas Lawrence's col- 
lection at London, were the cartoons of Raphael and Michel 
xA.ngelo. This inestimable prize was offered to Oxford Uni- 
versity for seven thousand pounds. The offer was accepted, 
and the committee charged with the affair had collected three 
thousand pounds, when among other friends, they called on 
Lord Eldon. Instead of a hundred pounds, he surprised 
them by putting down his name for three thousand pounds. 
They told him, they should now very easily raise the re- 
mainder. " No," he said, " your men have probably already 
contributed all they can spare ; I can as well give the rest : " 
and he withdrew his cheque for three thousand, and wrote 
four thousand pounds. I saw the whole collection in April, 
1848. 

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me the 
manuscript Plato, of the date of a.d. 896, brought by Dr. 
Clarke from Egypt; a manuscript Virgil, of the same cen- 
tury; the first Bible printed at Mentz, (I believe in 1450) ; 
and a duplicate of the same, which had been deficient in 
about twenty leaves at the end. But, one day, being in 
Venice, he bought a room full of books and manuscripts, — 
every scrap and fragment, — for four thousand louis d'ors, 
and had the doors locked and sealed by the consul. On pro- 
ceeding, afterwards, to examine his purchase, he found the 
twenty deficient pages of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order; 
brought them to Oxford, with the rest of his purchase, and 
placed them in the volume ; but has too much awe for the 
Providence that appears in bibliography also, to suffer the 
reunited parts to be re-bound. The oldest building here is 
two hundred years younger than the frail manuscript brought 
by Dr. Clarke from Egypt. No candle or fire is ever lighted 
in the Bodleian. Its catalogue is the standard catalogue on 



UNIVERSITIES 435 

the desk of every library in Oxford. In each several col- 
lege, they underscore in red ink on this catalogue the titles 
of books contained in the library of that college, — the theory 
being that the Bodleian has all books. This rich library 
spent during the last year (1847) f° r tne purchase of books 
£1668. 

The logical English train a scholar as they train an engi- 
neer. Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave 
carpet, and Sheffield grinds steel. They know the use of a 
tutor, as they know the use of a horse; and they draw the 
greatest amount of benefit out of both. The reading men are 
kept by hard walking, hard riding, and measured eating and 
drinking, at the top of their condition, and two days before 
the examination, do no work, but lounge, ride, or run, to be 
fresh on the college doomsday. Seven years' residence is 
the theoretic period for a master's degree. In point of fact, 
it has long been three years' residence, and four years more 
of standing. This " three years " is about twenty-one months 
in all. 1 

" The whole expense," says Professor Sewel, " of ordi- 
nary college tuition at Oxford is about sixteen guineas a 
year." But this plausible statement may deceive a reader 
unacquainted with the fact that the principal teaching relied 
on is private tuition. And the expenses of private tuition are 
reckoned at from £50 to £70 a year, or $1000 for the whole 
course of three years and a half. At Cambridge $750 a year 
is economical, and $1500 not extravagant. 2 

The number of students and of residents, the dignity of the 
authorities, the value of the foundations, the history and the 
architecture, the known sympathy of entire Britain in what 
is done there, justify a dedication to study in the undergrad- 
uate, such as cannot easily be in America, where his college 
is half suspected by the Freshman to be insignificant in the 
scale beside trade and politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy 
in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other 
estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion 
are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the 
unanimous respect of all cultivated nations. 

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses; fills 

1 Huber, ii., p. 304. 2 Bristed: Five Years at an English University. 



436 ENGLISH TRAITS 

places, as they fall vacant, from the body of students. The 
number of fellowships at Oxford is 540, averaging £200 a 
year, with lodging and diet at the college. If a young Ameri- 
can, loving learning, and hindered by poverty, were offered 
a home, a table, the walks, and the library, in one of these 
academical palaces, and a thousand dollars a year as long as 
he chose to remain a bachelor, he would dance for joy. Yet 
these young men thus happily placed, and paid to read, are 
impatient of their few checks, and many of them preparing 
to resign their fellowships. They shuddered at the prospect 
of dying a Fellow, and they pointed out to me a paralytic 
old man, who was assisted into the hall. As the number of 
undergraduates at Oxford is only about 1200 or 1300, and 
many of these are never competitors, the chance of a fel- 
lowship is very great. The income of the nineteen colleges is 
conjectured at £150,000 a year. 

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of Greek 
and Latin, and of mathematics, and the solidity and taste of 
English criticism. Whatever luck there may be in this or that 
award, an Eton captain can write Latin longs and shorts, can 
turn the Court-Guide into hexameters, and it is certain 
that a Senior Classic can quote correctly from the Corpus 
Poetarum, and is critically learned in all the humanities. 
Greek erudition exists on the Isis and Cam, whether the 
Maud man or the Brazen Nose man be properly ranked or 
not; the atmosphere is loaded with Greek learning; the 
whole river has reached a certain height, and kills all that 
growth of weeds which this Castalian water kills. The En- 
glish nature takes culture kindly. So Milton thought. It 
refines the Norseman. Access to the Greek mind li-fts his 
standard of taste. He has enough to think of, and, unless of 
an impulsive nature, is indisposed from writing or speaking, 
by the fulness of his mind, and the new severity of his taste. 
The great silent crowd of thorough-bred Grecians always 
known to be around him, the English writer cannot ignore. 
They prune his orations, and point his pen. Hence, the style 
and tone of English journalism. The men have learned accu- 
racy and comprehension, logic, and pace, or speed of working. 
They have bottom, endurance, wind. When born with good 
constitutions, they make those eupeptic studying-mills, the 



UNIVERSITIES 437 

cast-iron men, the dura ilia, whose powers of performance 
compare with ours, as the steam-hammer with the music-box ; 
— Cokes, Mansfields, Seldens, and Bentleys, and when it hap- 
pens that a superior brain puts a rider on this admirable 
horse, we obtain those masters of the world who combine 
the highest energy in affairs, with a supreme culture. 

It is contended by those who have been bred at Eton, Har- 
row, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment 
within each of those schools is high-toned and manly; that 
in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired, mean- 
ness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are en- 
couraged: that an unwritten code of honor deals to the 
spoiled child of rank, and to the child of upstart wealth, an 
even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both, and 
does all that can be done to make them gentlemen. 

Again, at the universities, it is urged that all goes to form 
what England values as the flower of its national life, — a 
well-educated gentleman. The German Huber, in describing 
to his countrymen the attributes of an English gentleman, 
frankly admits that, " in Germany, we have nothing of the 
kind. A gentleman must possess a political character, an 
independent and public position, or, at least, the right of as- 
suming it. He must have average opulence, either of his own, 
or in his family. He should also have bodily activity and 
strength, unattainable by our sedentary life in public offices. 
The race of English gentlemen presents an appearance of 
manly vigor and form, not elsewhere to be found among an 
equal number of persons. No other nation produces the 
stock. And, in England, it has deteriorated. The university 
is a decided presumption in any man's favor. And so emi- 
nent are the members that a glance at the calendars will show 
that in all the world one cannot be in better company than 
on the books of one of the larger Oxford or Cambridge 
colleges." 3 

These seminaries are finishing schools for the upper classes, 
and not for the poor. The useful is exploded. The defini- 
tion of a public school is " a school which excludes all that 
could fit a man for standing behind a counter." * 

3 Huber : History of the English Universities, Newman's translation. 

4 See Bristed : Five Years in an English University, New York, 1852. 

BB HC V 



438 ENGLISH TRAITS 

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted. Oxford, 
which equals in wealth several of the smaller European 
states, shuts up the lectureships which were made " public 
for all men thereunto to have concourse"; mis-spends the 
revenues bestowed for such youths " as should be most meet 
for towardness, poverty, and painfulness" -; there is gross 
favoritism; many chairs and many fellowships are made 
beds of ease; and 'tis likely that the university will know 
how to resist and make inoperative the terrors of parliamen- 
tary inquiry; no doubt, their learning is grown obsolete; — 
but Oxford also has its merits, and I found here also proof 
of the national fidelity and thoroughness. Such knowledge 
as they prize they possess and impart. Whether in course or 
by indirection, whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners 
with prizes and foundation scholarships, education according 
to the English notion of it is arrived at. I looked over the 
Examination Papers of the year 1848, for the various scholar- 
ships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean- 
Ireland, and the University (copies of which were kindly 
given me by a Greek professor), containing the tasks which 
many competitors had victoriously performed, and I believed 
they would prove too severe tests for the candidates for a 
Bachelor's degree in Yale or Harvard. And, in general, here 
was proof of a more searching study in the appointed direc- 
tions, and the knowledge pretended to be conveyed was con- 
veyed. Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty very able 
men, and three or four hundred well-educated men. 

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount of 
old Norse power. A fop will fight, and, in exigent circum- 
stances, will play the manly part. In seeing these youths, I 
.believed I saw already an advantage in vigor and color and 
general habit, over their contemporaries in American col- 
leges. No doubt much of the power and brilliancy of the 
reading-men is merely constitutional or hygienic. With a 
hardier habit and resolute gymnastics, with five miles more 
walking, or five ounces less eating, or with a saddle and 
gallop of twenty miles a day, with skating and rowing- 
matches, the American would arrive at as robust exegesis 
and cheery and hilarious tone. I should readily concede 
these advantages, which it would be easy to acquire, if I 



UNIVERSITIES 439 

did not find also that they read better than we, and write 
better. 

English wealth, falling on their school and university train- 
ing, makes a systematic reading of the best authors, and to 
the end of a knowledge how the things whereof they treat 
really stand: whilst pamphleteer or journalist reading for 
an argument for a party, or reading to write, or, at all events, 
for some by-end imposed on them, must read meanly and 
fragmentarily. Charles I. said that he understood English 
law as well as a gentleman ought to understand it. 

Then they have access to books ; the rich libraries collected 
at every one of many thousands of houses, give an advantage 
not to be attained by a youth in this country, when one thinks 
how much more and better may be learned by a scholar who, 
immediately on hearing of a book, can consult it, than by one 
who is on the quest for years, and reads inferior books be- 
cause he cannot find the best. 

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other 
up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and 
knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection. 

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which see- 
ing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as 
churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints. Yet we 
all send our sons to college, and, though he be a genius, he 
must take his chance. The university must be retrospective. 
The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers 
blows out of antiquity. Oxford is a library, and the pro- 
fessors must be librarians. And I should as soon think of 
quarrelling with the janitor for not magnifying his office by 
hostile sallies into the street like the Governor of Kertch or 
Kinburn, as of quarrelling with the professors for not admir- 
ing the young neologists who pluck the beards of Euclid and 
Aristotle, or for attempting themselves to fill their vacant 
shelves as original writers. 

It is easy to carp at college, and the college, if we will 
wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, 
but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of 
Commons. It is rare, precarious, eccentric, and darkling. 
England is the land of mixture and surprise, and when you 
have settled it that the universities are moribund, out comes 



440 ENGLISH TRAITS 

a poetic influence from the heart of Oxford, to mould the 
opinions of cities, to build their houses as simply as birds 
their nests, to give veracity to art, and charm mankind, as an 
appeal to moral order always must. But besides this restora- 
tive genius, the best poetry of England of this age, in the old 
forms, comes from two graduates of Cambridge. 



CHAPTER XIII 

RELIGION 

No people, at the present day, can be explained by their 
national religion. They do not feel responsible for it; it lies 
far outside of them. Their loyalty to truth, and their labor 
and expenditure rest on real foundations, and not on a na- 
tional church. An English life, it is evident, does not grow 
out of the Athanasian creed, or the Articles, or the Eucharist. 
It is with religion as with marriage. A youth marries in 
haste; afterward, when his mind is opened to the reason of 
the conduct of life, he is asked what he thinks of the institu- 
tion of marriage, and of the right relations of the sexes? " I 
should have much to say," he might reply, " if the question 
were open, but I have a wife and children, and all question is 
closed for me." In the barbarous days of a nation, some 
cultus is formed or imported; altars are built, tithes are paid, 
priests ordained. The education and expenditure of the 
country take that direction,, and when wealth, refinement, 
great men, and ties to the world supervene, its prudent men 
say, why fight against Fate, or lift these absurdities which are 
now mountainous? Better find some niche or crevice in this 
mountain of stone which religious ages have quarried and 
carved, wherein to bestow yourself, than attempt anything 
ridiculously and dangerously above your strength, like re- 
moving it. 

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say, as 
to-day, in front of Dundee Church tower, which is eight hun- 
dred years old, "This was built by another and a better race 
than any that now look on it." And, plainly, there has been 
great power of sentiment at work in this island, of which 
these buildings are the proofs: as volcanic basalts show the 



RELIGION 441 

work of fire which has been extinguished for ages. England 
felt the full heat of the Christianity which fermented Eu- 
rope, and drew, like the chemistry of fire, a firm line between 
barbarism and culture. The power of the religious sentiment 
put an end to human sacrifices., checked appetite, inspired the 
crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants, inspired self-respect, 
set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded liberty, created 
the religious architecture, — York, Newstead, Westminster, 
Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Beverly, and Dundee, — works to 
which the key is lost, with the sentiment which created them ; 
inspired the English Bible, the liturgy, the monkish histories, 
the chronicle of Richard of Devizes. The priest translated 
the Vulgate, and translated the sanctities of old hagiology 
into English virtues on English ground. It was a certain 
affirmative or aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man 
awoke, refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the 
northern savages exasperated Christianity into power. It 
lived by the love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted 
two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found attached to the 
soil. The clergy obtained respite from labor for the boor on 
the Sabbath, and on church festivals. " The lord who com- 
pelled his boor to labor between sunset on Saturday and sun- 
set on Sunday, forfeited him altogether." The priest came 
out of the people, and sympathized with his class. The 
church was the mediator, check, and democratic principle, in 
Europe. Latimer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Par- 
sons, Sir Harry Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan, are the 
democrats, as well as the saints, of their times. The Catholic 
church, thrown on this toiling, serious people, has made in 
fourteen centuries a massive system, close fitted to the man- 
ners and genius of the country, at once domestical and 
stately. In the long time, it has blended with everything 
in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves through a 
zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day of the year, every 
town and market and headland and monument, and has 
coupled itself with the almanac, that no court can be held, 
no field ploughed, no horse shod; without some leave from the 
church. All maxims of prudence, or shop, or farm, are fixed 
and dated by the church. Hence, its strength in the agri- 
cultural districts. The distribution of land into parishes en- 



442 ENGLISH TRAITS 

forces a church sanction to every civil privilege; and the 
gradation of the clergy, — prelates for the rich, and curates 
for the poor, — with the fact that a classical education has 
been secured to the clergyman, makes them " the link which 
unites the sequestered peasantry with the intellectual ad- 
vancement of the age." x 

The English church has many certificates to show of hum- 
ble effective service in humanizing the people, in cheering 
and refining men, feeding, healing, and educating. It has 
the seal of martyrs and confessors ; the noblest books ; a 
sublime architecture; a ritual marked by the same secular 
merits, nothing cheap or purchasable. 

From this slow-grown church important reactions proceed ; 
much for culture, much for giving a direction to the nation's 
affection and will to-day. The carved and pictured chapel, 
— its entire surface animated with image and emblem, — made 
the parish-church a sort of book and Bible to the people's eye. 

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the 
vernacular tongue, it was the tutor and university of the 
people. In York minster, on the day of the enthronization of 
the new archbishop, I heard the service of evening prayer 
read and chanted in the choir. It was strange to hear the 
pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in the 
morning of the world, read with circumstantiality in York 
minster, on the 13th January, 1848, to the decorous English 
audience, just fresh from the Times newspaper and their 
wine; and listening with all the devotion of national pride. 
That was binding old and new to some purpose. The rever- 
ence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus 
has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved. 
Here in England every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader 
in the Times. 

Another part of the same service on this occasion was not 
insignificant. Handel's coronation anthem, God save the 
King, was played by Dr. Camidge on the organ, with sublime 
effect. The minster and the music were made for each other. 
It was a hint of the part the church plays as a political engine. 
From his infancy, every Englishman is accustomed to hear 
daily prayers for the Queen, for the royal family and the 

1 Wordsworth. 



RELIGION 443 

Parliament, by name ; and this lifelong consecration of these 
personages cannot be without influence on his opinions. 

The universities, also., are parcel of the ecclesiastical sys- 
tem, and their first design is to form the clergy. Thus the 
clergy for a thousand years have been the scholars of the 
nation. 

The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken 
order and tradition of its church; the liturgy, ceremony, 
architecture; the sober grace, the good company, the con- 
nection with the throne, and with history, which adorn it. 
And whilst it endears itself thus to men of more taste than 
activity, the stability of the English nation is passionately 
enlisted to its support, from its inextricable connection with 
the cause of public order, with politics, and with the funds. 

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least, there 
must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in the society. 
These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists. No 
church has had more learned, industrious, or devoted men; 
plenty of " clerks and bishops, who, out of their gowns, would 
turn their backs on no man." 2 Their architecture still glows 
with faith in immortality. Heats and genial periods arrive in 
history, or shall we say., plentitudes of Divine Presence, by 
which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and great 
virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, twelfth, thir- 
teenth, and again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
when the nation was full of genius and piety. 

But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beckets ; 
of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers ; of the Taylors, Leightons, 
Herberts; of the Sherlocks, and Butlers, is gone. Silent 
revolutions in opinion have made it impossible that men like 
these should return, or find a place in their once sacred 
stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this church has glided away 
to animate other activities ; and they who come to the old 
shrines find apes and players rustling the old garments. 

The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When 
you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come 
into his ambassador's chapel, and put his face for silent 
prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling 

2 Fuller. 



444 ENGLISH TRAITS 

how much national pride prays' with him, and the religion of 
a gentleman. So far is he from attaching any meaning to the 
words, that he believes himself to have done almost the gen- 
erous thing, and that it is very condescending in him to pray 
to God. A great duke said, on the occasion of a victory, in 
the House of Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had 
not been well used by them, and that it would become their 
magnanimity, after so great successes, to take order that a 
proper acknowledgment be made. It is the church of the 
gentry; but it is not the church of the poor. The operatives 
do not own it, and gentlemen lately testified in the House of 
Commons that in their lives they never saw a poor man in a 
ragged coat inside a church. 

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous En- 
glish understanding shows how much wit and folly can agree 
in one brain. Their religion is a quotation ; their church is 
a doll; and any examination is interdicted with screams of 
terror. In good company, you expect them to laugh at the 
fanaticism of the vulgar ; but they do not : they are the vulgar. 

The English, in common perhaps with Christendom in the 
nineteenth century, do not respect power, but only perform- 
ance; value ideas only for an economic result. Wellington 
esteems a saint only as far as he can be an army chaplain: — 
" Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct and good sense, got 
the better of Methodism, which had appeared among the 
soldiers, and once among the officers." They value a philos- 
opher as they value an apothecary who brings bark or a 
drench; and inspiration is only some blowpipe, or a finer 
mechanical aid. 

I suspect that there is in an Englishman's brain a valve 
that can be closed at pleasure, as an engineer shuts off steam. 
The most sensible and well-informed men possess the power 
of thinking just so far as the bishop in religious matters, and 
as the chancellor of the exchequer in politics. They talk with 
courage and logic, and show you magnificent results, but the 
same men who have brought free trade or geology to their 
present standing, look grave and lofty, and shut down their 
valve, as soon as the conversation approaches the English 
church. After that, you talk with a box-turtle. 

The action of the university, both in what is taught, and in 



RELIGION 445 

the spirit of the place, is directed more on producing an En- 
glish gentleman, than a saint or a psychologist. It ripens a 
bishop, and extrudes a philosopher. I do not know that there 
is more cabalism in the Anglican, than in other churches, 
but the Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. 
They say, here, that, if you talk with a clergyman, you are 
sure to find him well-bred, informed, and candid. He enter- 
tains your thought or your project with sympathy and praise. 
But if a second clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an end: 
two together are inaccessible to your thought, and, whenever 
it comes to action, the clergyman invariably sides with his 
church. 

The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good 
sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The 
gospel it preaches is, " By taste are ye saved." It keeps the 
old structures in repair, spends a world of money in music 
and building; and in buying Pugin, and architectural litera- 
ture. It has a general good name for amenity and mildness. 
It is not in ordinary a persecuting church; it is not inquisi- 
torial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly well-bred, and can 
shut its eyes on all proper occasions. If you let it alone, it 
will let you alone. But its instinct is hostile to all change in 
politics, literature, or social arts. The church has not been 
the founder of the London University, of the Mechanics' In- 
stitutes, of the Free School, or whatever aims at diffusion of 
knowledge. The Platonists of Oxford are as bitter against 
this heresy, as Thomas Taylor. 

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion of Eng- 
land. The first leaf of the New Testament it does not open. 
It believes in a Providence which does not treat with levity 
a pound sterling. They are neither Transcendentalists nor 
Christians. They put up no Socratic prayer, much less any 
saintly prayer for the queen's mind; ask neither for light nor 
right, but say bluntly, " Grant her in health and wealth long 
to live." And one traces this Jewish prayer in all English 
private history, from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard 
of Devizes' Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel 
Romilly, and of Haydon the painter. "Abroad with my 
wife," writes Pepys piously, " the first time that ever I rode 
in my own coach; which do make my heart rejoice and praise 



446 ENGLISH TRAITS 

God, and pray him to bless it to me, and continue it." The 
bill for the naturalization of the Jews (in 1753) was resisted 
by petitions from all parts of the kingdom, and by petition 
from the city of London, reprobating this bill, as, " tending 
extremely to the dishonor of the Christian religion, and ex- 
tremely injurious to the interests and commerce of the king- 
dom in general, and of the city of London in particular." 

But they have not been able to congeal humanity by act 
of Parliament. " The heavens journey still and sojourn not," 
and arts, wars, discoveries, and opinion go onward at their 
own pace. The new age has new desires, new enemies, new 
trades, new charities, and reads the Scriptures with new eyes. 
The chatter of French politics, the steam-whistle, the hum 
of the mill, and the noise of embarking emigrants had quite 
put most of the old legends out of mind; so that when you 
came to read the liturgy to a modern congregation, it was 
almost absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade 
of old costumes. 

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystallize a 
religion. It is endogenous, like the skin, and other vital 
organs. A new statement every day. The prophet and 
apostle knew this, and the nonconformist confutes the con- 
formists, by quoting the texts they must allow. It is the 
condition of a religion, to require religion for its expositor. 
Prophet and apostle can only be rightly understood by prophet 
and apostle. The statesman knows that the religious element 
will not fail, any more than the supply of fibrine and chyle; 
but it is in its nature constructive, and will organize such a 
church as it wants. The wise legislator will spend on tem- 
ples, schools, libraries, colleges, but will shun the enriching of 
priests. If, in any manner, he can leave the election and pay- 
ing of the priest to the people, he will do well. Like the 
Quakers, he may resist the separation of a class of priests, 
and create opportunity and expectation in the society, to run 
to meet natural endowment, in this kind. But, when wealth 
accrues to a chaplaincy, a bishopric, or rectorship, it requires 
moneyed men for its stewards, who will give it another direc- 
tion than to the mystics of their day. Of course, money will 
do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and 
unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed. The class 



RELIGION 447 

certain to be excluded from all preferment are the religious, 
— and driven to other churches; — which is nature's vis 
medicatrix. 

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid. 
This abuse draws into the church the children of the nobility, 
and other unfit persons, who have a taste for expense. Thus 
a bishop is only a surpliced merchant. Through his lawn, I 
can see the bright buttons of the shopman's coat glitter. A 
wealth like that of Durham makes almost a premium on 
felony. Brougham, in a speech in the House of Commons on 
the Irish elective franchise, said, " How will the reverend 
bishops of the other house be able to express their due abhor- 
rence of the crime of perjury, who solemnly declare in the 
presence of God, that when they are called upon to accept 
a living, perhaps of £4000 a year, at that very instant, they 
are moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and adminis- 
tration thereof, and for no other reason whatever?" The 
modes of initiation are more damaging than custom-house 
oaths. The Bishop is elected by the Dean and Prebends of 
the cathedral. The Queen sends these gentlemen a conge 
d'elire, or leave to elect ; but also sends them the name of the 
person whom they are to elect. They go into the cathedral, 
chant and pray, and beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in 
their choice ; and, after these invocations, invariably find that 
the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recommenda- 
tions of the Queen. 

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long 
as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest man 
in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a 
man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall 
not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, 
you sink into the class of counterfeits. Besides, this suc- 
cumbing has grave penalties. If you take in a lie, you must 
take in all that belongs to it. England accepts this orna- 
mented national church, and it glazes the eyes, bloats the 
flesh, gives the voice a stertorous clang, and clouds the under- 
standing of the receivers. 

The English church, undermined by German criticism, had 
nothing left but tradition, and was led logically back to 
Romanism. But that was an element which only hot heads 



448 ENGLISH TRAITS 

could breathe : in view of the educated class, generally, it was 
not a fact to front the sun; and the alienation of such men 
from the church became complete. 

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious persons are 
driven out of the Established Church into sects, which in- 
stantly rise to credit, and hold the Establishment in check. 
Nature has sharper remedies, also. The English, abhorring 
change in all things, abhorring it most in matters of religion, 
cling to the last rag of form, and are dreadfully given to cant. 
The English (and I wish it were confined to them, but 'tis a 
taint in the Anglo-Saxon blood in both hemispheres), the 
English and the Americans cant beyond all other nations. 
The French relinquish all that industry to them. What is so 
odious as the polite bows to God, in our books and news- 
papers? The popular press is flagitious in the exact measure 
of its sanctimony, and the religion of the day is a theatrical 
Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by the property-man. 
The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. Punch finds an 
inexhaustible material. Dickens writes novels on Exeter- 
Hall humanity. Thackeray exposes the heartless high life. 
Nature revenges herself more summarily by the heathenism 
of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury calls the poor thieves 
together, and reads sermons to them, and they call it " gas." 
George Borrow summons the Gypsies to hear his discourse on 
the Hebrews in Egypt, and reads to them the Apostles' Creed 
in Romany. " When I had concluded," he says, " I looked 
around me. The features of the assembly were twisted, and 
the eyes of all turned upon me with a frightful squint: not 
an individual present but squinted; the genteel Pepa, the 
good-humored Chicharona, the Cosdami, all squinted: the 
Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all." 

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has 
nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent 
gentleman, and reads fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has 
no resource but to take wine with him. False position intro- 
duces cant, perjury, simony, and ever a lower class of mind 
and character into the clergy: and, when the hierarchy is 
afraid of science and education, afraid of piety, afraid of 
tradition, and afraid of theology, there is nothing left but to 
quit a church which is no longer one. 



LITERATURE 449 

But the religion of England, — is it the Established Church? 
no; is it the sects? no; they are only perpetuations of some 
private man's dissent, and are to the Established Church as 
cabs are to a coach, cheaper and more convenient, but really 
the same thing. Where dwells the religion? Tell me first 
where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought, or gesture. 
They do not dwell or stay at all. Electricity cannot be made 
fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the 
Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it 
fixed, as the English do with their things, f orevermore ; it is 
passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a 
surprise, a secret, which perplexes them, and puts them out. 
Yet, if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the 
suffering of all evil, souffrir de tout le monde et ne faire 
souffrir personne, that divine secret has existed in England 
from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and 
of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame. 



CHAPTER XIV 

LITERATURE 

A strong common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat or 
disturb, marks the English mind for a thousand years : a rude 
strength newly applied to thought, as of sailors and soldiers 
who had lately learned to read. They have no fancy, and 
never are surprised into a covert or witty word, such as 
pleased the Athenians and Italians, and was convertible into 
a fable not, long after; but they delight in strong earthly ex- 
pression, not mistakable, coarsely true to the human body, 
and, though spoken among princes, equally fit and welcome 
to the mob. This homeliness, veracity, and plain style ap- 
pear in the earliest extant works, and in the latest. It im- 
ports into songs and ballads the smell of the earth, the 
breath of cattle, and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a household 
charm, though by pails and pans. They ask their consti- 
tutional utility in verse. The kail and herrings are never out 
of sight. The poet nimbly recovers himself from every sally 
of the imagination. The English muse loves the farmyard, 



450 ENGLISH TRAITS 

the lane, and market. She says, with De Stael, " I tramp in 
the mire with wooden shoes, whenever they would force me 
into the clouds." For, the Englishman has accurate per- 
ceptions; takes hold of things by the right end, and there 
is no slipperiness in his grasp. He loves the axe, the spade, 
the oar, the gun, the steam-pipe: he has built the engine he 
uses. He is materialist, economical, mercantile. He must be 
treated with sincerity and reality, with muffins, and not the 
promise of muffins; and prefers his hot chop, with perfect 
security and convenience in the eating of it, to the chances 
of the amplest and Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on em- 
bossed paper. When he is intellectual, and a poet or a 
philosopher, he carries the same hard truth and the same keen 
machinery into the mental sphere. His mind must stand on 
a fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the 
mind must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he 
relishes in Dante is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds 
a mental image before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon 
painted on a shield. Byron " liked something craggy to 
break his mind upon." A taste for plain strong speech, what is 
called a biblical style, marks the English. It is in Alfred, 
and the Saxon Chronicle, and in the Sagas of the Northmen. 
Latimer was homely. Hobbes was perfect in the "noble 
vulgar speech." Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, 
Pepys, Hooker, Cotton, and the translators wrote it. How 
realistic or materialistic in treatment of his subject is Swift. 
He describes his fictitious persons, as if for the police. De- 
foe has no insecurity or choice. Hudibras has the same hard 
mentality, — keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to 
the intellect. 

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer's hard painting of his 
Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakspeare, Spen- 
ser, and Milton, in their loftiest ascents, have this national 
grip and exactitude of mind. This mental materialism makes 
the value of English transcendental genius; in these writers, 
and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne, and Sir Thomas 
Browne. The Saxon materialism and narrowness, exalted 
into the sphere of intellect, makes the very genius of Shaks- 
peare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it 
treads the clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its 



LITERATURE 451 

elevations, materialistic, its poetry; is common-sense in- 
spired ; or iron raised to white heat. 

The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. It 
is a tacit rule of the language to make the frame or skeleton 
of Saxon words, and, when elevation or ornament is sought, 
to interweave Roman; but sparingly; nor is a sentence made 
of Roman words alone, without loss of strength. The chil- 
dren and laborers use the Saxon unmixed. The Latin un- 
mixed is abandoned to the colleges and Parliament. Mixture 
is a secret of the English island; and, in their dialect, the 
male principle is the Saxon; the female, the Latin; and they 
are combined in every discourse. A good writer, if he has 
indulged in a Roman roundness, makes haste to chasten and 
nerve his period by English monosyllables. 

When the Gothic nations came into Europe, they found 
it lighted with the sun and moon of Hebrew and of Greek 
genius. The tablets of their brain, long kept in the dark, 
were finely sensible to the double glory. To the images 
from this twin source (of Christianity and art), the mind 
became fruitful as by the incubation of the Holy Ghost. 
The English mind flowered in every faculty. The common- 
sense was surprised and inspired. For two centuries, Eng- 
land was philosophic, religious, poetic. The mental furniture 
seemed of larger scale; the memory capacious like the store- 
house of the rains; the ardor and endurance of study; the 
boldness and facility of their mental construction; their 
fancy, and imagination, and easy spanning of vast distances 
of thought; the enterprise or accosting of new subjects; and, 
generally, the easy exertion of power, astonish, like the 
legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon 
precision and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the 
perfect example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two 
centuries. I find not only the great masters out of all 
rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the time charged 
with a masculine, force and freedom. 

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and closeness 
to the matter in hand, even in the second and third class 
of writers; and, I think, in the common style of the people, 
as one finds it in the citation of wills, letters, and public 
documents, in proverbs, and forms of speech. The more 



452 ENGLISH TRAITS 

hearty and sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness 
of the Norseman was not all gone. Their dynamic brains 
hurled off their words, as the revolving stone hurls off scraps 
of grit. I could cite from the seventeenth century sentences 
and phrases of edge not to be matched in the nineteenth. 
Their poets by simple force of mind equalized themselves 
with the accumulated science of ours. The country gentle- 
men had a posset or drink they called October; and the 
poets, as if by this hint, knew how to distil the whole season 
into their autumnal verses: and, as nature, to pique the 
more, sometimes works up deformities into beauty, in some 
rare Aspasia, or Cleopatra; and, as the Greek art wrought 
many a vase or column, in which too long, or too lithe, or 
nodes, or pits and flaws, are made a beauty of; so these were 
so quick and vital, that they could charm and enrich by 
mean and vulgar objects. 

A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, 
by which masques and poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full 
of heroic sentiment in a manly style, were received with 
favor. The unique fact in literary history, the unsurprised 
reception of Shakspeare; — the reception proved by his mak- 
ing his fortune; and the apathy proved by the absence of 
all contemporary panegyric, — seems to demonstrate an ele- 
vation in the mind of the people. Judge of the splendor of 
a nation, by the insignificance of great individuals in it. 
The manner in which they learned Greek and Latin, before 
our modern facilities were yet ready, without dictionaries, 
grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a professor, followed 
by their own searchings, — required a more robust memory, 
and cooperation of all the faculties ; and their scholars, Cam- 
den, Usher, Selden, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Bur- 
ton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the solidity and method 
of engineers. 

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their 
minds loved analogy; were cognizant of resemblances, and 
climbers on the staircase of unity. 'Tis a very old strife 
between those who elect to see identity, and those who elect 
to see discrepances ; and it renews itself in Britain. The 
poets, of course, are of one part; the men of the world, of 
the other. But Britain had many disciples of Plato; — More, 



LITERATURE 453 

Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, 
Donne, Spenser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cud- 
worth, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor. 

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of 
observations, on useful science, and his experiments, I sup- 
pose, were worth nothing. One hint of Franklin, or Watt, 
or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a talent for experi- 
ment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he 
drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the infTux of idealism 
into England. Where that goes, is poetry, health, and 
progress. The rules of its genesis or its diffusion are not 
known. That knowledge, if we had it, would supersede 
all that we call science of the mind. It seems an affair of 
race, or of meta-chemistry ; — the vital point being, — how 
far the sense of unity, or instinct of seeking resemblances, 
predominated. For, wherever the mind takes a step, it is, 
to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond 
.the lesser class with which it has been conversant. Hence 
all poetry and all affirmative action come. 

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the analo- 
gists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming from 
the best example) Platonists. Whoever discredits analogy, 
and requires heaps of facts, before any theories can be at- 
tempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or 
beautiful will be produced by him. Locke is as surely the 
influx of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the 
Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency; 
the so-called scientific is the negative and poisonous. 'Tis 
quite certain that Spenser, Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth 
will be Platonists; and that the dull men will be Lockists. 
Then politics and commerce will absorb from the educated 
class men of talents without genius, precisely because such 
have no resistance. 

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required, in 
his map of the mind, first of all, universality, or prima 
philosophxa, the receptacle for all such profitable observa- 
tions and axioms as fall not within the compass of any of 
the special parts of philosophy, but are more common, and 
of a higher stage. He held this element essential: it is 
never out of mind: he never spares rebukes for such as 

cc HCV 



454 ENGLISH TRAITS 

neglect it; believing that no perfect discovery can be made 
in a flat or level, but you must ascend to a higher science. 
" If any man thinketh philosophy and universality to be idle 
studies, he doth not consider that all professions are from 
thence served and supplied, and this I take to be a great 
cause that has hindered the progression of learning, because 
these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in pas- 
sage." He explained himself by giving various quaint 
examples of the summary or common laws, of which each 
science has its own illustration. He complains that " he 
finds this part of learning very deficient, the profounder sort 
of wits drawing a bucket now and then for their own use, 
but the spring--head unvisited. This was the dry light 
which did scorch and offend most men's watery natures." 
Plato had signified the same sense, when he said, " All the 
great arts require a subtle and speculative research into the 
law of nature, since loftiness of thought and perfect mastery 
over every subject seem to be derived from some such source 
as this. This Pericles had, in addition to a great natural 
genius. For, meeting with Anaxagoras, who was a person 
of this kind, he attached himself to him, and nourished him- 
self with sublime speculations on the absolute intelligence; 
and imported thence into the oratorical art whatever could 
be useful to it." 

A few generalizations always circulate in the world, whose 
authors we do not rightly know, which astonish, and appear 
to be avenues to vast kingdoms of thought, and these are 
in the world constants, like the Copernican and Newtonian 
theories in physics. In England, these may be traced usually 
to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even to Van Hel- 
mont and Behmen, and do all have a kind of filial retrospect 
to Plato and the Greeks. Of this kind is Lord Bacon's sen- 
tence, that " nature is commanded by obeying her ; " his 
doctrine of poetry, which " accommodates the shows of 
things to the desires of the mind," or the Zoroastrian defini- 
tion of poetry, mystical, yet exact, " apparent pictures of 
unapparent natures ; " Spenser's creed, that " soul is form, 
and doth the body make ; " the theory of Berkeley, that we 
have no certain assurance of the existence of matter; 
Doctor Samuel Clarke's argument for theism from the 



LITERATURE 455 

nature of space and time; Harrington's political rule that 
power must rest on land, — a rule which requires to be 
liberally interpreted; the theory of Swedenborg, so cos- 
mically applied by him, that the man makes his heaven and 
hell; Hegel's study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas 
and the victory of the deeper thought; the identity-philo- 
sophy of Schelling, couched in the statement that " ail dif- 
ference is quantitative." So the very announcement of the 
theory of gravitation, of Kepler's three harmonic laws, and 
even of Dalton's doctrine of definite proportions, finds a 
sudden response in the mind, which remains a superior evi- 
dence to empirical demonstrations. I cite these generaliza- 
tions, some of which are more recent, merely to indicate a 
class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane or the 
atmosphere from which they emanate, was the home and 
element of the writers and readers in what we loosely call 
the Elizabethan age (say, in literary history, the period 
from 1575 to 1625), yet a period almost short enough to 
justify Ben Jonson's remark on Lord Bacon : " About this 
time, and within his view, were born all the wits that could 
honor a nation, or help study." 

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once 
before. These heights could not be maintained. As we 
find stumps of vast trees in our exhausted soils, and have 
received traditions of their ancient fertility to tillage, so 
history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed races 
became effete. So it fared with English genius. These 
heights were followed by a meanness, and a descent of the 
mind into lower levels ; the loss of wings ; no high specu- 
lation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, 
became the type of philosophy, and his " understanding " 
the measure, in all nations, of the English intellect. His 
countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which 
they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the 
studies once so beloved; the powers of thought fell into 
neglect. The later English want the faculty of Plato and 
Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an insight 
of general laws so deep that the rule is deduced with equal 
precision from few subjects or from one, as from multitudes 
of lives. Shakspeare is supreme in that, as in all the great 



456 ENGLISH TRAITS 

mental energies. The Germans generalize: the English 
cannot interpret the German mind. German science com- 
prehends the English. The absence of the faculty in Eng- 
land is shown by the timidity which accumulates mountains 
of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of men and miles 
of redoubts, to compensate the inspirations of courage and 
conduct. 

The English shrink from a generalization. " They do not 
look abroad into universality, or they draw only a bucket- 
full at the fountain of the First Philosophy for their occa- 
sion, and do not go to the spring-head." Bacon, who said 
this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that faculty, 
at least among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair 
or high table-land to let down the English genius from the 
summits of Shakspeare, used this privilege sometimes in 
poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval after- 
wards, it is not found. Burke was addicted to generalizing, 
but his was a shorter line; as his thoughts have less depth, 
they have less compass. Hume's abstractions are not deep 
or wise. He owes his fame to one keen observation, that 
no copula had been detected between any cause and effect, 
either in physics or in thought; that the term cause and 
effect was loosely or gratuitously applied to what we know 
only as consecutive, not at all as casual. Doctor Johnson's 
written abstractions have little value: the tone of feeling 
in them makes their chief worth. 

Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written 
the history of European literature for three centuries, — a 
performance of great ambition, inasmuch as a judgment was 
to be attempted on every book. But his eye does not reach 
to the ideal standards: the verdicts are all dated from Lon- 
don: all new thought must be cast into the old moulds. The 
expansive element which creates literature is steadily denied. 
Plato is resisted, and his school. Hallam is uniformly polite, 
but with deficient sympathy; writes with resolute generosity, 
but is unconscious of the deep worth which lies in the 
mystics, and which often outvalues as a seed of power and 
a source of revolution all the correct .writers and shining 
reputations of their day. He passes in silence, or dismisses 
with a kind of contempt, the profounder masters : a lover 



LITERATURE 457 

of ideas is not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam 
inspires respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his mani- 
fest love of good books, and he lifts himself to own better 
than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and better 
than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hallam, or 
in the firmer intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one still finds 
the same type of English genius. It is wise and rich, but 
it lives on its capital. It is retrospective. How can it 
discern and hail the new forms that are looming up on 
the horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts which cannot dress 
themselves out of any old wardrobe of the past? 

The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day have the 
like municipal limits. Dickens, with the preternatural appre- 
hension of the language of manners, and the varieties of 
street life, with pathos and laughter, with patriotic and still 
enlarging generosity, writes London tracts. He is a painter 
of English details, like Hogarth; local and temporary in 
his tints and style, and local in his aims. Bulwer, an in- 
dustrious writer, with occasional ability, is distinguished 
for his reverence of intellect as a temporality, and appeals 
to the worldly ambition of the student. His romances tend 
to fan these low flames. Their novelists despair of the 
heart. Thackeray finds that God has made no allowance 
for the poor thing in his universe ; — more's the pity, he 
thinks; — but 'tis not for us to be wiser: we must renounce 
ideals, and accept London. 

The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the 
English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that 
good means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; 
that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on 
" fruit " ; to yield economical inventions ; and that its merit 
is to avoid ideas, and to avoid morals. He thinks it the 
distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph 
over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from 
theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down 
to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey 
for an invalid ; — this not ironically, but in good faith ; — 
that " solid advantage," as he calls it, meaning always sen- 
sual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of 
astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the 



458 ENGLISH TRAITS 

fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the 
London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the 
civility and religion of England for a thousand years ends 
in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a sauce 
pan. 

The critic hides his scepticism under the English cant of 
practical. To convince the reason, to touch the conscience, 
is romantic pretension. The fine arts fall to the ground. 
Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not exist. It 
is very certain, I may say in passing, that if Lord Bacon 
had been only the sensualist his critic pretends, he would 
never have acquired the fame which now entitles him to 
this patronage. It is because he had imagination, the lei- 
sures of the spirit, and basked in an element of contemplation 
out of all modern English atmospheric gauges, that he is 
impressive to the imaginations of men, and has become a 
potentate not to be ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the 
high place of Bacon without finding Newton indebted to 
him, and thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it by specific 
gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any tutoring, 
more or less, of Newton, &c, but an effect of the same cause 
which showed itself more pronounced afterwards in Hooke, 
Boyle, and Halley. 

Coleridge, a catholic mind with a hunger for ideas, with 
eyes looking before and after to the highest bards and sages, 
and who wrote and spoke the only high criticism in his time, 
— is one of those who save England from the reproach of no 
longer possessing the capacity to appreciate what rarest wit 
the island has yielded. Yet the misfortune of his life, 
his vast attempts but most inadequate performings, failing 
to accomplish any one masterpiece, seems to mark the 
closing of an era. Even in him, the traditional Englishman 
was too strong for the philosopher, and he fell into accom- 
modations: and, as Burke had striven to idealize the English 
State, so Coleridge " narrowed his mind " in the attempt to 
reconcile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church 
with eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking tacti- 
turn minority, uttering itself in occasional criticism, oftener 
in private discourse, one would say that in Germany and in 
America is the best mind in England rightly respected. It 



i* 



LITERATURE 459 

is the surest sign of national decay, when the Bramins can 
no longer read or understand the Braminical philosophy. 

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all this 
materialism, Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the pettiness 
and the cant, into the preaching of Fate. In comparison 
with all this rottenness, any check, any cleansing, though by 
fire, seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw little differ- 
ence in the gladiators, or the " causes " for which they com- 
bated; the one comfort was that they were all going speed- 
ily into the abyss together: And his imagination, finding 
no nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by celebrating 
the majestic beauty of the laws of decay. The necessities 
of mental structure force all minds into a few categories, 
and where impatience of the tricks of men makes Nemesis 
amiable, and builds altars to the negative Deity, the in- 
evitable recoil is to heroism or the gallantry of the private 
heart, which decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal 
combat of will against fate. 

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of 
Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to 
metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor, with a 
catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, 
and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of 
old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic 
roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking 
what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. 
If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the 
orbit is larger, and the return is not yet : but a master should 
inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his convictions, 
and give his present studies always the same high place. 

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone 
of English thought, and much more easy to adduce examples 
of excellence in particular veins : and if, going out of the 
region of dogma, we pass into that of general culture, there 
is no end of the graces and amenities, wit, sensibility, and 
erudition, of the learned class. But the artificial succor 
which marks all English performance, appears in letters 
also : much of their aesthetic production is antiquarian and 
manufactured, and literary reputations have been achieved 
by forcible men, whose relation to literature was purely 



460 ENGLISH TRAITS 

accidental, but who were driven by tastes and modes they 
found in vogue into their several careers. So, at this 
moment, every ambitious young man studies geology: so 
members of Parliament are made, and churchmen. 

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on 
the national mind. They are incapable of an inutility, and 
respect the five mechanic powers even in their song. The 
voice of their modern muse has a slight hint of the steam- 
whistle, and the poem is created as an ornament and finish 
of their monarchy, and by no means as the bird of a new 
morning which forgets the past world in the full enjoyment 
of that which is forming. They are with difficulty ideal; 
they are the most conditioned men, as if, having the best 
conditions, they could not bring themselves to forfeit them. 
Every one of them is a thousand years old, and lives by 
his memory : and when you say this, they accept it as praise. 

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, 
statistics, tabulation, and engineering, and even what is 
called philosophy and letters is mechanical in its structure, 
as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, 
no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more. 
The tone of colleges, and of scholars and of literary society, 
has this mortal air. I seem to walk on a marble floor, where 
nothing will grow. They exert every variety of talent on a 
lower ground, and may be said to live and act in a sub-mind. 
They have lost all commanding views in literature, philos- 
ophy, and science. A good Englishman shuts himself out 
of three-fourths of his mind, and confines himself to one- 
fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labor, and 
logic : but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archi- 
medes; a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that expe- 
rience must follow and not lead the laws of the mind; a 
devotion to the theory of politics, like that of Hooker, and 
Milton, and Harrington, the modern English mind re- 
pudiates. 

I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they 
have known how to make it repulsive, and bereave nature 
of its charm; — though perhaps the complaint flies wider, 
and the vice attaches to many more than to British phys- 
icists. The eye of the naturalist must have a scope like 



LITERATURE 461 

nature itself, a susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the 
heart as well as to the logic of creation. But English science 
puts humanity to the door. It wants the connection which is 
the test of genius. The science is false by not being poetic. 
It isolates the reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain ; 
whilst reptile or mollusk only exists in system,- in relation. 
The poet only sees it as an inevitable step in the path of the 
Creator. But, in England, one hermit finds this fact, and 
another finds that, and lives and dies ignorant of its value. 
There are great exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of 
ideas; perhaps of Robert Brown, the botanist; and of 
Richard Owen, who has imported into Britain the German 
homologies, and enriched science with contributions of his 
own, adding sometimes the divination of the old masters to 
the unbroken power of labor in the English mind. But for 
the most part, the natural science in England is out of its 
loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of imagination and 
free play of thought, as conveyancing. It stands in strong 
contrast with the genius of the Germans, those semi-Greeks, 
who love analogy, and, by means of their height of view, 
preserve their enthusiasm, and think for Europe. 

No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no secure 
striding from experiment onward to a foreseen law, but only 
a casual dipping here and there, like diggers in California 
" prospecting for a placer " that will pay. A horizon of 
brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts down around 
his senses. Squalid contentment with conventions, satire 
at the names of philosophy and religion, parochial and shop- 
till politics, and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life and 
spirit. As they trample on nationalities to reproduce Lon- 
don and Londoners in Europe and Asia, so they fear the 
hostility of ideas, of poetry, of religion, — ghosts which they 
cannot lay; — and, having attempted to domesticate and dress 
the Blessed Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, 
they are tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that 
will sweep their system away. The artists say, " Nature 
puts them out ; " the scholars have become un-ideal. They 
parry earnest speech with banter and Jevity; they laugh 
you .down, or they change the subject. " The fact is," say 
they, over their wine, " all that about liberty, and so forth, 



462 ENGLISH TRAITS 

is gone by; it won't do any longer." The practical and 
comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims, and the 
smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry. 
No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct of his 
rhymes. No priest dares hint at a Providence which does 
not respect English utility. The island is a roaring volcano 
of fate, of material values, of tariffs, and laws of repression, 
glutted markets, and low prices. 

In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of 
knowledge, and the surrender to nature, there is the sup- 
pression of the imagination, the priapism of the senses and 
the understanding; we have the factitious instead of the 
natural; tasteless expense, arts of comfort, and the reward- 
ing as an illustrious inventor whosoever will contrive one 
impediment more to interpose between the man and his 
obj ects. 

Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope and 
his school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What 
did Walter Scott write without stint? a rhymed traveller's 
guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses they print 
have this Birmingham character. How many volumes of 
well-bred metre we must gingle through, before we can be 
filled, taught, renewed ! We want the miraculous ; the 
beauty which we can manufacture at no mill, — can give no 
account of; the beauty of which ,Qiaucer and Chapman had 
the secret. The poetry of course is low and prosaic; only 
now and then, as in Wordsworth, conscientious ; or in Byron, 
passional, or in Tennyson, factitious. But if I should count 
the poets who have contributed to the bible of existing Eng- 
land sentences of guidance and consolation which are still 
glowing and effective, — how few ! Shall I find my heavenly 
bread in the reigning poets? Where is great design in mod- 
ern English poetry? The English have lost sight of the fact 
that poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no 
wealth of description or of fancy is yet essentially new, and 
out of the limits of prose, until this condition is reached. 
Therefore the grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded 
their designs, and* less considered the finish. It was their 
office to lead to the divine sources, out of which all this, 
and much more, readily springs; and, if this religion is in 



LITERATURE 463 

the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can well 
afford some staidness, or hardness, or want of popular tune 
in the verses. 

The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Words- 
worth. He had no master but nature and solitude. " He 
wrote a poem/' says Landor, " without the aid of war." His 
verse is the voice of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age. 
One regrets that his temperament was not more liquid and 
musical. He has written longer than he was inspired. But 
for the rest, he has no competitor. 

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Words- 
worth wanted. There is no finer ear, nor more command of 
the keys of language. Color, like the dawn, flows over the 
horizon from his pencil, in waves so rich that we do not 
miss the central form. Through all his refinements, too, 
he has reached the public, — a certificate of good sense and 
general power, since he who aspires to be the English poet 
• must be as large as London, not in the same kind as London, 
but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs 
no mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He 
contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is, 
and proposes no better. There are all degrees in poetry, and 
we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it is only 
a first success, when the ear is gained. The best office 
of the best poets has been to show how low and uninspired 
was their general style, and that only once or twice they have 
struck the high chord. 

That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic ele- 
ment, they have not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who 
said, " Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and 
break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms." 
A stanza of the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, 
and he does not value the salient and curative influence of 
intellectual action, studious of truth, without a by-end. 

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste 
for Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, 
made up of trifles, clinging to a corporeal civilization, hating 
ideas, there is no remedy like the Oriental largeness. That 
astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once there 
is thunder it never heard, light it never saw, and power 



464 ENGLISH TRAITS 

which trifles with time and space. I am not surprised, then, 
to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings, who had been 
struck with the grand style of thinking in the Indian writ- 
ings, deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen, while 
offering them a translation of the Bhagvat. " Might I, an 
unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude 
of criticism, I should exclude, in estimating the merit of such 
a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern 
literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or 
manners as are become the standards of propriety for opinion 
and action in our modes, and, equally, all appeals to our 
revealed tenets of religion and moral duty." 1 He goes on to 
bespeak indulgence to " ornaments of fancy unsuited to 
our taste, and passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into 
which our habits of judgment will find it difficult to pursue 
them." 

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in the 
English race, which seems to make any recoil possible ; in 
other words, there is at all times a minority of profound 
minds existing in the nation, capable of appreciating every 
soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency. While the 
constructive talent seems dwarfed and superficial, the criti- 
cism is often in the noblest tone, and suggests the presence 
of the invisible gods. I can well believe what I have often 
heard, that there are two nations in England; but it is not 
the Poor and the Rich; nor is it the Normans and Saxons; 
nor the Celt and the Goth. These are each always becoming 
the other; for Robert Owen does not exaggerate the power 
of circumstance. But the two complexions, or two styles 
of mind, — the perceptive class, and the practical finality 
class, — are ever in counterpoise, interacting mutually; one 
in hopeless minorities; the other, in huge masses; one 
studious, contemplative, experimenting; the other, the un- 
grateful pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing itself 
of the knowledge for gain; these two nations, of genius and 
of animal force, though the first consist of only a dozen 
souls, and the second of twenty millions, forever by their 
discord and their accord yield the power of the English 
State. 

1 Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta. 



THE "TIMES" 465 

CHAPTER XV 

THE "TIMES." 

The power of the newspaper is familiar in America, and 
in accordance with our political system. In England, it 
stands in antagonism with the feudal institutions, and it 
is all the more beneficent succor against the secretive tend- 
encies of a monarchy. The celebrated Lord Somers "knew 
of no good law proposed and passed in his time, to which 
the public papers had not directed his attention." There 
is no corner and no night. A relentless inquisition drags 
every secret to the day, turns the glare of this solar micro- 
scope on every malfaisance, so as to make the public a more 
terrible spy than any foreigner; and no weakness can be 
taken advantage of by an enemy, since the whole people are 
already forwarned. Thus England rids herself of those 
incrustations which have been the ruin of old states. Of 
course, this inspection is feared. No antique privilege, no 
comfortable monopoly, but sees surely that its days are 
counted; the people are familiarized with the reason of re- 
form, and, one by one, take away every argument of the 
obstructives. " So your grace likes the comfort of reading 
the newspapers," said Lord Mansfield to the Duke of North- 
umberland; " mark my words; you and I shall not live to see 
it, but this young gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or it may 
be a little later ; but a little sooner or later, these newspapers 
will most assuredly write the dukes of Northumberland out of 
their titles and possessions, and the country out of its king." 
The tendency in England towards social and political insti- 
tutions like those of America, is inevitable, and the ability 
of its journals is the driving force. 

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men who possess 
the talent of writing off-hand pungent paragraphs, expressing 
with clearness and courage their opinion on any person or 
performance. Valuable or not, it is a skill that is rarely 
found, out of the English journals. The English do this, 
as they write poetry, as they ride and box, by being educated 
to it. Hundreds of clever Praeds, and Freres, and Froudes, 
and Hoods, and Hooks, and Maginns, and Mills, and Ma- 



466 ENGLISH TRAITS 

caulays, make poems or short essays for a journal, as they 
make speeches in Parliament and on the hustings, or as 
they shoot and ride. It is a quite accidental and arbitrary 
direction of their general ability. Rude health and spirits, 
an Oxford education, and the habits of society are implied, 
but not a ray of genius. It comes of the crowded state of 
the professions, the violent interest which all men take in 
politics, the facility of experimenting in the journals, and 
high pay. 

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the " Times " 
newspaper. No power in England is more felt, more feared, 
or more obeyed. What you read in the morning in that 
journal, you shall hear in the evening in all society. It 
has ears everywhere, and its information is earliest, com- 
pletest, and surest. It has risen, year by year, and victory 
by victory, to its present authority. I asked one of its old 
contributors, whether it had once been abler than it is now? 
"Never," he said; "these are its palmiest days." It has 
shown those qualities which are dear to Englishmen, unflinch- 
ing adherence to its objects, prodigal intellectual ability, and 
a towering assurance, backed by the perfect organization 
in its printing-house, and its world-wide network of cor- 
respondence and reports. It has its own history and famous 
trophies. In 1820, it adopted the cause of Queen Caro- 
line, and carried it against the king. It adopted a poor-law 
system, and almost alone lifted it through. When Lord 
Brougham was in power, it decided against him, and pulled 
him down. It declared war against Ireland, and conquered 
it. It adopted the League against the Corn Laws, and, 
when Cobden had begun to despair, it announced his triumph. 
It denounced and discredited the French Republic of 1848, 
and checked every sympathy with it in England, until it had 
enrolled 200,000 special constables to watch the Chartists, 
and make them ridiculous on the 10th April. It first de- 
nounced and then adopted the new French Empire, and 
urged the French Alliance and its results. It has entered 
into each municipal, literary, and social question, almost with 
a controlling voice. It has done bold and seasonable service 
in exposing frauds which threatened the commercial com- 
munity. Meantime, it attacks its rivals by perfecting its 



THE "TIMES" 467 

printing machinery, and will drive them out of circulation : 
for the only limit to the circulation of the " Times " is the 
impossibility of printing copies fast enough ; since a daily 
paper can only be new and seasonable for a few hours. It 
will kill all but that paper which is diametrically in opposi- 
tion; since many papers, first and last, have lived by their 
attacks on the leading journal. 

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the " Times," and had 
gradually arranged the whole materiel of it in perfect system. 
It is told that when he demanded a small share in the pro- 
prietary, and was refused, he said, " As you please, gentle- 
men ; and you may take away the ' Times ' from this office, 
when you will ; I shall publish the ' New Times,' next Mon- 
day morning." The proprietors, who had already complained 
that his charges for printing were excessive, found that 
they were in his power, and gave him whatever he wished. 

I went one day with a good friend to the " Times " office, 
which was entered through a pretty garden-yard, in Printing- 
House Square. We walked with some circumspection, as 
if we were entering a powder-mill; but the door was opened 
by a mild old woman, and, by dint of some transmission of 
cards, we were at last conducted into the parlor of Mr. 
Morris, a very gentle person, with no hostile appearances. 
The statistics are now quite out of date, but I remember he 
told us that the daily printing was then 35,000 copies; that 
on the 1st March, 1848, the greatest number ever printed, — 
54,000 were issued; that since February, the daily circulation 
had increased by 8,000 copies. The old press they were then 
using printed five or six thousand sheets per hour; the new 
machine, for which they were then building an engine, would 
print twelve thousand per hour. Our entertainer confided us 
to a courteous assistant to show us the establishment, in 
which, I think, they employed a hundred and twenty men. 
I remember I saw the reporters' room, in which they redact 
their hasty stenographs, but the editor's room, and who is in 
it, I did not see, though I shared the curiosity of mankind 
respecting it. 

The staff of the " Times " has always been made up of 
able men. Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Alsiger, 
Horace Twiss, Jones Loyd, John Oxenford, Mr. Moseley, 



468 ENGLISH TRAITS 

Mr. Bailey, have contributed to its renown in their special 
departments. But it has never wanted the first pens for oc- 
casional assistance. Its private information is inexplicable, 
and recalls the stories of Fouche's police, whose omniscience 
made it believed that the Empress Josephine must be in his 
pay. It has mercantile and political correspondents in every 
foreign city; and its expresses outrun the despatches of the 
government. One hears anecdotes of the rise of its servants, 
as of the functionaries of the India House. I was told of 
the dexterity of one of its reporters, who, finding himself, 
on one occasion, where the magistrates had strictly forbidden 
reporters, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with pencil 
in one hand, and tablet in the other, did his work. 

The influence of this journal is a recognized power in Eu- 
rope, and, of course, none is more conscious of it than its 
conductors. The tone of its articles has often been the oc- 
casion of comment from the official organs of the continental 
courts, and sometimes the ground of diplomatic complaint. 
What would the " Times " say ? is a terror in Paris, in 
Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen, and in Nepaul. Its con- 
summate discretion and success exhibit the English skill of 
combination. The daily paper is the work of many hands, 
chiefly, it is said, of young men recently from the University, 
and perhaps reading law in chambers in London. Hence the 
academic elegance, and classic allusion, which adorn its col- 
umns. Hence, too, the heat and gallantry of its onset. But 
the steadiness of the aim suggests the belief that this fire is 
directed and fed by older engineers; as if persons of exact 
information, and with settled views of policy, supplied the 
writers with the basis of fact, and the object to be attained, 
and availed themselves of their younger energy and eloquence 
to plead the cause. Both the council and the executive de- 
partments gain by this division. Of two men of equal ability, 
the one who does not write, but keeps his eye on the course 
of public affairs, will have the higher judicial wisdom. But 
the parts are kept in concert; all the articles appear to pro- 
ceed from a single will. The " Times " never disapproves of 
what itself has said, or cripples itself by apology for the 
absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of him who held the 
pen. It speaks out bluff and bold, and sticks to what it says. 



THE "TIMES" 469 

It draws from any number of learned and skilful contribu- 
tors; but a more learned and skilful person supervises, cor- 
rects, and coordinates. Of this closet, the secret does not 
transpire. No writer is suffered to claim the authorship of 
any paper; everything good, from whatever quarter, comes 
out editorially; and thus, by making the paper- everything, 
and those who write it nothing, the character and the awe of 
the journal gain. 

The English like it for its complete information. A state- 
ment of fact in the " Times " is as reliable as a citation from 
Hansard. Then, they like its independence; they do not 
know, when they take it up, what their paper is going to say : 
but, above all, for the nationality and confidence of its tone. 
It thinks for them all; it is their understanding and day's 
ideal daguerreotyped. When I see them reading its columns, 
they seem to me becoming every moment more British. It 
has the national courage, not rash and petulant, but con- 
siderate and determined. No dignity or wealth is a shield 
from its assault. It attacks a duke as readily as a policeman, 
and with the most provoking airs of condescension. It makes 
rude work with the Board of Admiralty. The Bench of 
Bishops is still less safe. One Bishop fares badly for his ra- 
pacity, and another for his bigotry, and a third for. his courtli- 
ness. It addresses occasionally a hint to Majesty itself, and 
sometimes a hint which is taken. There is an air of freedom 
even in their advertising columns, which speaks well for Eng- 
land to a foreigner. On the days when I arrived in London 
in 1847, I rea d among the daily announcements, one offering 
a reward of fifty pounds to any person who would put a 
nobleman, described by name and title, late a member of 
Parliament, into any county jail in England, he having been 
convicted of obtaining money under false pretences. 

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this paper. 
Every slip of an Oxonian or Cantabrigian who writes his 
first leader, assumes that we subdued the earth before we 
sat down to write this particular " Times." One would 
think, the world was on its knees to the " Times " Office, for 
its daily breakfast. But this arrogance is calculated. Who 
would care for it if it " surmised," or " dared to confess," or 
" ventured to predict," &c. No ; it is so, and so it shall be. 

DD HC V 



470 ENGLISH TRAITS 

The morality and patriotism of the " Times " claims only 
to be representative, and by no means ideal. It gives the 
argument, not of the majority, but of the commanding class. 
Its editors know better than to defend Russia, or Austria, 
or English vested rights, on abstract grounds. But they 
give a voice to the class who, at the moment, take the lead; 
and they have an instinct for finding where the power now 
lies, which is eternally shifting its banks. Sympathizing 
with and speaking for the class that rules the hour, yet being 
apprised of every ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, 
every Church squabble, every strike in the mills, they detect 
the first tremblings of change. They watch the hard and 
bitter struggles of the authors of each liberal movement, 
year by year, — watching them only to taunt and obstruct 
them, — until, at last, when they see that these have estab- 
lished their fact, that power is on the point of passing to 
them, — they strike in, with the voice of a monarch, astonish 
those whom they succor, as much as those whom they desert, 
and make victory sure. Of course, the aspirants see that 
the " Times " is one of the goods of fortune, not to be won 
but by winning their cause. 

" Punch " is equally an expression of English good sense, 
as the " London Times." It is the comic version of the same 
sense. Many of its caricatures are equal to the best pam- 
phlets, and will convey to the eye in an instant the popular 
view which was taken of each turn of public affairs. Its 
sketches are usually made by masterly hands, and sometimes 
with genius ; the delight of every class, because uniformly 
guided by that taste which is tyrannical in England. It is a 
new trait of the nineteenth century that the wit and humor 
of England, as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, 
Dickens, Thackeray, Hood, have taken the direction of 
humanity and freedom. 

The " Times," like every important institution, shows the 
way to a better. It is a living index of the colossal British 
power. Its existence honors the people who dare to print 
all they know, dare to know all the facts, and do not wish 
to be flattered by hiding the extent of the public disaster. 
There is always safety in valor. I wish I could add that 
this journal aspired to deserve the power it wields, by 



STONEHENGE 471 

guidance of the public sentiment to the right. It is usually 
pretended, in Parliament and elsewhere, that the English 
press has a high tone, — which it has not. It has an imperial 
tone as of a powerful and independent nation. But as with 
other empires, its tone is prone to be official, and even 
officinal. The " Times " shares all the limitations of the 
governing classes, and wishes never to be in a minority. 
If only it dared to cleave to the right, to show the right 
to be the only expedient, and feed its batteries from the 
central heart of humanity, it might not have so many men 
of rank among its contributors, but genius would be its 
cordial and invincible ally; it might now and then bear 
the brunt of formidable combinations, but no journal is 
ruined by wise courage. It would be the natural leader 
of British reform ; its proud function, that of being the voice 
of Europe, the defender of the exile and patriot against 
despots, would be more effectually discharged; it would 
have the authority which is claimed for that dream of good 
men not yet come to pass, an International Congress ; and 
the least of its victories would be to give to England a new 
millennium of beneficent power. 



CHAPTER XVI 

STONEHENGE 

It had been agreed betwen my friend Mr. C. and me, that 
before I left England we should make an excursion together 
to Stonehenge, which neither of us had seen; and the 
project pleased my fancy with the double attraction of the 
monument and the companion. It seemed a bringing to- 
gether of extreme points, to visit the oldest religious monu- 
ment in Britain, in company with her latest thinker, and one 
whose influence may be traced in every contemporary book. 
I was glad to sum up a little my experiences, and to ex- 
change a few reasonable words on the aspects of England, 
with a man on whose genius I set a very high value, and 
who had as much penetration, and as severe a theory of 
duty, as any person in it. On Friday, 7th July, we took the 



472 ENGLISH TRAITS 

South Western Railway through Hampshire to Salisbury, 
where we found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The 
fine weather and my friend's local knowledge of Hampshire, 
in which he is wont to spend a part of every summer, made 
the way short. There was much to say, too, of the travelling 
Americans, and their usual objects in London. I thought 
it natural that they should give some time to works of art 
collected here, which they cannot find at home, and a little 
to scientific clubs and museums, which at this moment, make 
London very attractive. But my philosopher was not con- 
tented. Art and " high art " is a favorite target for his wit. 
" Yes, Kunst is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller 
wasted a great deal of good time on it : " — and he thinks 
he discovers that old Goethe found this out, and, in his 
later writings, changed his tone. As soon as men begin 
to talk of art, architecture, and antiquities, nothing good 
comes of it. He wishes to go through the British Museum 
in silence, and thinks a sincere man will see something, and 
say nothing. In these days, he thought, it would become 
an architect to consult only the grim necessity, and say, " I 
can build you a coffin for such dead persons as you are, 
and for such dead purposes as you have, but you shall have 
no ornament." For the science, he had, if possible, even less 
tolerance, and compared the savans of Somerset House to 
the boy who asked Confucius " how many stars in the sky ? " 
Confucius replied, " he minded things near him : " then 
said the boy, " how many hairs are there in your eyebrows ? " 
Confucius said, " he didn't know and didn't care." 

Still speaking of the Americans, C. complained that they 
dislike the coldness and exclusiveness of the English, and 
run away to France, and go with their countrymen, and 
are amused, instead of manfully staying in London, and 
confronting Englishmen, and acquiring their culture, who 
really have much to teach them. 

I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and was accustomed 
to concede readily all that an Englishman would ask ; I 
saw everywhere in the country proofs of sense and spirit, 
and success of every sort : I like the people : they are as 
good as they are handsome; they have everything, and can 
do everything: but meantime, I surely know that, as soon 



STONEHENGE 473 

as I return to Massachusetts, I shall lapse at once into the 
feeling, which the geography of America inevitably inspires, 
that we play the game with immense advantage ; that there 
and not here is the seat and centre of the British race; and 
that no skill or activity can long compete with the prodigious 
natural advantages of that country, in the hands of the same 
race; and that England, an old and exhausted island, must 
one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only 
in her children. But this was a proposition which no 
Englishman of whatever condition can easily entertain. 

We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to 
Amesbury, passing by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once 
containing the town which sent two members to Parliament, 
— now, not a hut; — and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at 
the George Inn. After dinner, we walked to Salisbury 
Plain. On the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house 
was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked like a 
group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse, — Stonehenge 
and the barrows, — which rose like green bosses about the 
plain, and a few hayricks. On the top of a mountain, the 
old temple would not be more impressive. Far and wide 
a few shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a 
bagman drove along the road. It looked as if the wide mar- 
gin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple were 
accorded by the veneration of the British race to 1 the old egg 
out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history 
had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a 
diameter of a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and third 
colonnade within. We walked round the stones, and clam- 
bered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange aspect 
and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind 
among them, where C. lighted his cigar. It was pleasant 
to see that just this simplest of all simple structures, — two 
upright stones and a lintel laid across, — had long outstood 
all later churches, and all history, and were like what is 
most permanent on the face of the planet: these, and the 
barrows, — mere mounds (of which there are a hundred and 
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge), like 
the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes 
good to the passing mariner on Hellespont the vaunt of 



474 ENGLISH TRAITS 

Homer and the fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure, 
grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild thyme, daisy, 
meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass. 
Over us, larks were soaring and singing, — as my friend said, 
" the larks which were hatched last year, and the wind 
which was hatched many thousand years ago." We counted 
and measured by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew 
as much as any man can suddenly know of the inscrutable 
teample. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once 
probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular, 
and uncovered, and the situation fixed astronomically, — the 
grand entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly 
northeast, " as all the gates of the old cavern temples are." 
How came the stones here? for these sarsens, or Druidical 
sandstones, are not found in this neighborhood. The sacri- 
ficial stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks, 
that can resist the action of fire, and as I read in the books, 
must have been brought one hundred and fifty miles. 

On almost every stone we found the marks of the miner- 
alogist's hammer and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones 
of the inner circle are of granite. I, who had just come 
from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum of mega- 
theria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some 
cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these 
rocks one on another. Only the good beasts must have 
known how to cut a well-wrought tenon and mortise, and to 
smooth the surface of some of the stones. The chief mystery 
is that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on 
so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the 
muses have kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. 
We are not yet too late to learn much more than is known 
of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes or Layard will 
arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that exhaustive 
British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice 
of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge, or Choir Gaur 
to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nin- 
eveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of its plan, 
and its good preservation, is as if new and recent; and, a 
thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the ac- 
curate history it will yet eliminate. We walked in and out, 



STONEHENGE 475 

and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones. 
The old sphinx put our petty differences of nationality out 
of sight. To these conscious stones we two pilgrims were 
alike known and near. We could equally well revere their 
old British meaning. My philosopher was subdued and gentle. 
In this quiet house of destiny, he happened to say, " I plant 
cypresses wherever I go, and if I am in search of pain, I 
cannot go wrong." The spot, the gray blocks, and their rude 
order, which refuses to be disposed of, suggested to him the 
flight of ages, and the succession of religions. The old times 
of England impress C. much : he reads little, he says, in these 
last years, but "Acta Sanctorum" the fifty-three volumes of 
which are in the " London Library." He finds all English 
history therein. He can see, as he reads, the old saint of 
Iona sitting there, and writing, a man to men. The Acta 
Sanctorum show plainly that the men of those times believed 
in God, and in the immortality of the soul, as their abbeys 
and cathedrals testify: now, even the puritanism is all gone. 
London is pagan. He fancied that greater men had lived in 
England, than any of her writers; and, in fact, about the 
time when those writers appeared, the last of these were 
already gone. 

We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to re- 
turn the next morning, and coming back two miles to our 
inn, we were met by little showers, and late as it was, men 
and women were out attempting to protect their spread wind- 
rows. The grass grows rank and dark in the showery Eng- 
land. At the inn, there was only milk for one cup of tea. 
When we called for more, the girl brought us three drops. 
My friend was annoyed who stood for the credit of an English 
inn, and still more, the next morning, by the dogcart, sole 
procurable vehicle, in which we were to be sent to Wilton. 
I engaged the local antiquary, Mr. Brown, to go with us 
to Stonehenge, on our way, and show us what he knew of 
the " astronomical " and " sacrificial " stones. I stood on the 
last, and he pointed to the upright, or rather, inclined stone, 
called the " astronomical," and bade me notice that its 
top ranged with the sky-line. "Yes." Very well. Now, 
at the summer solstice, the sun rises exactly over the 
top of that stone, and, at the Druidical temple at Abury, 



476 ENGLISH TRAITS 

there is also an astronomical stone in the same relative 
positions. 

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science be- 
comes an important clew; but we were content to leave the 
problem with the rocks. Was this the " Giants' Dance " 
which Merlin brought from Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Uther 
Pendragon's monument to the British nobles whom Hengist 
slaughtered here, as Geoffrey of Monmouth relates? or was 
it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained to King James; 
or identical in design and style with the East Indian temples 
of the sun; as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains? 
Of all the writers, Stukeley is the best. The heroic an- 
tiquary, charmed with the geometric perfections of his ruin, 
connects it with the oldest monuments and religion of the 
world, and, with the courage of his tribe, does not stick to 
say, " the Deity who made the world by the scheme of Stone- 
henge." He finds that the cursus 1 on Salisbury Plain 
stretches across the downs, like a line of latitude upon the 
globe, and the meridian line of Stonehenge passes exactly 
through the middle of this cursus. But here is the high 
point of the theory : the Druids had the magnet ; laid their 
courses by it; their cardinal points in Stonehenge, Ambres- 
bury, and elsewhere, which vary a little from true east, 
and west, followed the variations of the compass. The 
Druids were Phoenicians. The name of the magnet is lapis 
Heracleus, and Hercules was the god of the Phoenicians. 
Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the 
sun-god gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over 
the ocean. What was this, but a compass-box? This cup 
or little boat, in which the magnet was made to float on water, 
and so show the north, was probably its first form, before 
it was suspended on a pin. But science was an arcanum, 
and, as Britain was a Phoenician secret, so they kept their 
compass a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian commerce. 
The golden fleece, again, of Jason, was the compass, — a bit 
of loadstone, easily supposed to be the only one in the world, 

1 Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cursus. The avenue 
is a narrow road of raised earth, extending 594 yards in a straight line 
from the grand entrance, then dividing into two branches, which led, sev- 
erally, to a row of barrows; and to the cursus, — an artificially formed flat 
tract of ground. This is half a mile northeast from Stonehenge, bounded 
by banks and ditches, 3,036 yards long, by no broad. 



STONEHENGE 477 

and therefore naturally awakening the cupidity and ambition 
of the young heroes of a maritime nation to join in an ex- 
pedition to obtain possession of this wise stone. Hence 
the fable that the ship Argo was loquacious and oracular. 
There is also some curious coincidence in the names. Apol- 
lodorus makes Magnes the son of Mollis, who married Nais. 
On hints like these, Stukeley builds again the grand colon- 
nade into historic harmony, and computing backward by the 
known variations of the compass, bravely assigns the year 
406 before Christ for the date of the temple. 

For the difficulty of handling and carrying stones of this 
size, the like is done in all cities, every day, with no other 
aid than horse power. I chanced to see a year ago men at 
work on the substructure of a house in Bowdoin Square, in 
Boston, swinging a block of granite the size of the largest 
of the Stonehenge columns with an ordinary derrick. The 
men were common masons, with paddies to help, nor did they 
think they were doing anything remarkable. I suppose, 
there were as good men a thousand years ago. And we 
wonder how Stonehenge was built and forgotten. After 
spending half an hour on the spot, we set forth in our dog- 
cart over the downs for Wilton, C. not suppressing some 
threats and evil omens on the proprietors, for keeping these 
broad plains a wretched sheep-walk, when so many thousands 
of English men were hungry and wanted labor. But I heard 
afterwards that it is not an economy to cultivate this land, 
which only yields one crop on being broken up, and is then 
spoiled. 

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall, — the renowned seat 
of the Earls of Pembroke, a house known to Shakspeare 
and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir Philip Sidney, 
where he wrote the Arcadia; where he conversed with Lord 
Brooke, a man of deep thought, and a poet, who caused to 
be engraved on his tombstone, " Here lies Fulke Greville 
Lord Brooke, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney." It is now 
the property of the Earl of Pembroke, and the residence of 
his brother, Sidney Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble 
specimen of English manor-hall. My friend had a letter 
from Mr. Herbert to his housekeeper, and the house was 
shown. The state drawing-room is a double cube, 30 feet 



478 ENGLISH TRAITS 

high, by 30 feet wide, by 60 feet long: the adjoining room 
is a single cube, of 30 feet every way. Although these apart- 
ments and the long library were full of good family portraits, 
Vandykes and others, and though there were some good 
pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full of antique and modern 
statuary, — to which C, ? catalogue in hand, did all too much 
justice, — yet the eye was still drawn to the windows, to a 
magnificent lawn, on which grew the finest cedars in Eng- 
land. I had not seen more charming grounds. We went 
out, and walked over the estate. We crossed a bridge built 
by Inigo Jones over a stream, of which the gardener did not 
know the name (Qu. Alph?), watched the deer; climbed to 
the lonely sculptured summer house, on a hill backed by a 
wood; came down into the Italian garden, and into a French 
pavilion, garnished with French busts; and so again to the 
house, where we found a table laid for us with bread, meats, 
peaches, grapes, and wine. 

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury. 
The Cathedral, which was finished 600 years ago, has even 
a spruce and modern air, and its spire is the highest in Eng- 
land. I know not why, but I had been more struck with one 
of no fame at Coventry, which rises 300 feet from the ground, 
with the lightness of a mullein-plant, and not at all implicated 
with the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the culmination 
of the Gothic art in England, as the buttresses are fully un- 
masked, and honestly detailed from the sides of the pile. 
The interior of the Cathedral is obstructed by the organ in 
the middle, acting like a screen. I know not why in real 
architecture the hunger of the eye for length of line is so 
rarely gratified. The rule of art is that a colonnade is 
more beautiful the longer it is, and that ad infinitum. And 
the nave of a church is seldom so long that it need be divided 
by a screen. 

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst ser- 
vice was said. Whilst we listened to the organ, my friend 
remarked, the music is good, and yet not quite religious, 
but somewhat as if a monk were panting to some fine Queen 
of Heaven. C. was unwilling, and we did not ask to have 
the choir shown us, but returned to our inn, after seeing 
another old church of the place. We passed in the train 



STONEHENGE 479 

Clarendon Park, but could see little but the edge of a wood, 
though C. had wished to pay closer attention to the birth- 
place of the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we 
stopped, and found Mr. H., who received us in his carriage, 
and took us to his house at Bishops Waltham. 

On Sunday, we had much discourse on a very, rainy day. 
My friends asked whether there were any Americans? — any 
with an American idea, — any theory of the right future of 
that country? Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither 
of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cab- 
inet-ministers, nor of such as would make of America an- 
other Europe. I thought only of the simplest and purest 
minds ; I said, " Certainly yes ; — but those who hold it are 
fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate 
to your English ears, to which it might be only ridiculous, — 
and yet it is the only true." So I opened the dogma of 
no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the ob- 
jections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. 
I said, it is true that I have never seen in any country a 
man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is 
plain to me that no less valor than this can command my 
respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar 
musket-worship,^ — though great men be musket-worshippers; 
— and 'tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need 
another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a 
clean revolution. I fancied that one or two of my anecdotes 
made some impression on C, and I insisted that the mani- 
fest absurdity of the view to English feasibility could make 
no difference to a gentleman ; that as to our secure tenure 
of our mutton-chop and spinage in London or in Boston, 
the soul might quote Talleyrand, "Monsieur, je n'en vols 
pas la necessite." 2 As I had thus taken in the conversation 
the saint's part, when dinner was announced, C. refused to 
go out before me, — " he was altogether too wicked." I 
planted my back against the wall, and our host wittily 
rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, he was the wicked- 
est, and would walk out first, then C. followed, and I went 
last. 

On the way to Winchester, whither our host accompanied 

2 " Mais, Monseigneur, il faut que j'existe." 



480 ENGLISH TRAITS 

us in the afternoon, my friends asked many questions re- 
specting American landscape, forests, houses, — my house, 
for example. It is not easy to answer these queries well. 
There I thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, over- 
growing, almost conscious, too much by half for man in 
the picture, and so giving a certain trisiesse, like the rank 
vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in 
dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not 
able to make much impression. There, in that great sloven 
continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky 
skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great 
mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows 
and over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, I 
am quite too sensible of this. Every one is on his good 
behavior, and must be dressed for dinner at six. So I put 
off my friends with very inadequate details, as best I could. 

Just before entering Winchester, we stopped at the Church 
of Saint Cross, and, after looking through the quaint an- 
tiquity, we demanded a piece of bread and a draught of beer, 
which the founder, Henry de Blois, in 1136, commanded 
should be given to every one who should ask it at the gate. 
We had both, from the old couple who take care of the 
church. Some twenty people, every day, they said, make 
the same demand. This hospitality of seven hundred years' 
standing did not hinder C. from pronouncing a malediction 
on the priest who receives £2000 a year, that were meant 
for the poor, and spends a pittance on this small beer and 
crumbs. 

In the Cathedral I was gratified, at least by the ample 
dimensions. The length of line exceeds that of any other 
English church; being 556 feet by 250 in breadth of tran- 
sept. I think I prefer this church to all I have seen, except 
Westminster and York. Here was Canute buried, and here 
Alfred the Great was crowned and buried, and here the 
Saxon kings: and, later, in his own church, William of 
Wykeham. It is very old: part of the crypt into which we 
went down and saw the Saxon and Norman arches of the 
old church on which the present stands, was built fourteen 
or fifteen hundred years ago. Sharon Turner says, " Alfred 
was buried at Winchester, in the Abbey he had founded 



PERSONAL 481 

there, but his remains were removed by Henry I. to the 
new Abbey in the meadows at Hyde, on the northern 
quarter of the city, and laid under the high altar. The 
building was destroyed at the Reformation, and what is left 
of Alfred's body now lies covered by modern buildings, 
or buried in the ruins of the old." 3 William of Wyke- 
ham's shrine tomb was unlocked for us, and C. took hold 
of the recumbent statue's marble hands, and patted them 
affectionately, for he rightly values the brave man who 
built Windsor, and this Cathedral, and the School here, and 
New College at Oxford. But it was growing late in the 
afternoon. Slowly we left the old house, and parting with 
our host, we took the train for London. 



CHAPTER XVII 

PERSONAL 

In these comments on an old journey now revised after 
seven busy years have much changed men and things in 
England, I have abstained from reference to persons, except 
in the last chapter, and in one or two cases where the fame 
of the parties seemed to have given the public a property in 
all that concerned them. I must further allow myself a few 
notices, if only as an acknowledgment of debts that cannot 
be paid. My journeys were cheered by so much kindness 
from new friends, that my impression of the island is bright 
with agreeable memories both of public societies and of 
households : and, what is nowhere better found than in Eng- 
land, a cultivated person fitly surrounded by a happy home, 
" with honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," is of all 
institutions the best. At the landing in Liverpool, I found 
my Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a gentleman 
whose kind reception was followed by a train of friendly 
and effective attentions which never rested whilst I remained 
in the country. A man of sense and of letters, the editor of 
a powerful local journal, he added to solid virtues an infinite 
sweetness and bonhommie. There seemed a pool of honey 

3 History of the Anglo-Saxons, I., 599. 



482 ENGLISH TRAITS 

about his heart which lubricated all his speech and action 
with fine jets of mead. An equal good fortune attended 
many later accidents of my journey, until the sincerity of 
English kindness ceased to surprise. My visit fell in the 
fortunate days when Mr. Bancroft was the American Minis- 
ter in London, and at his house, or through his good offices, 
I had easy access to excellent persons and to privileged 
places. At the house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent 
in society and in letters. The privileges of the Athenaeum 
and of the Reform Clubs were hospitably opened to me, and 
I found much advantage in the circles of the " Geologic," the 
" Antiquarian," and the " Royal Societies." Every day in 
London gave me new opportunities of meeting men and 
women who give splendor to society. I saw Rogers, Hallam, 
Macaulay, Milnes, Milman, Barry Cornwall, Dickens, Thack- 
eray, Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, DTsraeli, Helps, Wilkinson, 
Bailey, Kenyon, and Forster: the younger poets, Clough, 
Arnold, and Patmore ; and, among the men of science, Robert 
Brown, Owen, Sedgwick, Faraday, Buckland, Lyell, De la 
Beche, Hooker, Carpenter, Babbage, and Edward Forbes. It 
was my privilege also to converse with Miss Baillie, with 
Lady Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson, and Mrs. Somerville. A 
finer hospitality made many private houses not less known 
and dear. It is not in distinguished circles that wisdom and 
elevated characters are usually found, or, if found, not con- 
fined thereto; and my recollections of the best hours go 
back to private conversations in different parts of the king- 
dom, with persons little known. Nor am I insensible to the 
courtesy which frankly opened to me some noble mansions, 
if I do not adorn my page with their names. Among the 
privileges of London, I recall with pleasure two or three 
signal days, one at Kew, where Sir William Hooker showed 
me all the riches of the vast botanic garden ; one at the Mu- 
seum, where Sir Charles Fellowes explained in detail the 
history of his Ionic trophy-monument; and still another, on 
which Mr. Owen accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and 
myself through the Hunterian Museum. 

The like frank hospitality, bent on real service, I found 
among the great and the humble, wherever I went; in Bir- 
mingham, in Oxford, in Leicester, in Nottingham, in Shef- 



PERSONAL 483 

field, in Manchester, in Liverpool. At Edinburgh, through 
the kindness of Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the acquaintance 
of De Quincey, of Lord Jeffrey, of Wilson, of Mrs. Crowe, 
of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man of high character 
and genius, the short-lived painter, David Scott. 

At Ambleside, in March, 1848, I was for a couple of days 
the guest of Miss Martineau, then newly returned from her 
Egyptian tour. On Sunday afternoon I accompanied her to 
Rydal Mount. And as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth, 
many years before, I must not forget this second interview. 
We found Mr. Wordsworth asleep on the sofa. He was at 
first silent and indisposed, as an old man suddenly waked, 
before he had ended his nap; but soon became full of talk 
on the French news. He was nationally bitter on the French : 
bitter on Scotchmen, too. No Scotchman, he said, can write 
English. He detailed the two models, on one or the other of 
which all the sentences of the historian Robertson are framed. 
Nor could Jeffrey nor the Edinburgh Reviewers write En- 
glish, nor can . . . , who is a pest to the English tongue. 
Incidentally he added, Gibbon cannot write English. The 
Edinburgh Review wrote what would tell and what would 
sell. It had however changed the tone of its literary criticism 
from the time when a certain letter was written to the editor 
by Coleridge. Mrs. W. had the editor's answer in her pos- 
session. Tennyson he thinks a right poetic genius, though 
with some affectation. He had thought an elder brother of 
Tennyson at first the better poet, but must now reckon Alfred 
the true one. ... In speaking of I know not what style, he 
said, " to be sure, it was the manner, but then you know the 
matter always comes out of the manner." ... He thought 
Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for a great capital 
city. . . . We talked of English national character. I told 
him, it was not creditable that no one in all the country knew 
anything of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst in every 
American library his translations are found. I said, if Plato's 
Republic were published in England as a new book to-day, do 
you think it would find any readers ? — he confessed, it would 
not : " And yet," he added after a pause, with that compla- 
cency which never deserts a true-born Englishman, " and yet 
we have embodied it all." 



484 ENGLISH TRAITS 

His opinions of French, English, Irish, and Scotch seemed 
rashly formulized from little anecdotes of what had befallen 
himself and members of his family, in a diligence or stage- 
coach. His face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation 
was not marked by special force or elevation. Yet perhaps 
it is a high compliment to the cultivation of the English gen- 
erally, when we find such a man not distinguished. He had 
a healthy look, with a weather-beaten face, his face corru- 
gated, especially the large nose. 

Miss Martineau, who lived near him, praised him to me 
not for his poetry, but for thrift and economy; for having 
afforded to his country-neighbors an example of a modest 
household, where comfort and culture were secured without 
any display. She said that, in his early housekeeping at the 
cottage where he first lived, he was accustomed to offer his 
friends bread and plainest fare: if they wanted anything 
more, they must pay him for their board. It was the rule of 
the house. I replied that it evinced English pluck more than 
any anecdote I knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood told 
the story of Walter Scott's staying once for a week with 
Wordsworth, and slipping out every day under pretence of a 
walk, to the Swan Inn, for a cold cut and porter; and one 
day passing with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by 
the landlord's asking him if he had come for his porter. Of 
course, this trait would have another look in London, and 
there you will hear from different literary men that Words- 
worth had no personal friend, that he was not amiable, that 
he was parsimonious, &c. Landor, always generous, says 
that he never praised anybody. A gentleman in London 
showed me a watch that once belonged to Milton, whose ini- 
tials are engraved on its face. He said, he once showed this 
to Wordsworth, who took it in one hand, then drew out his 
own watch, and held it up with the other, before the company, 
but no one making the expected remark, he put back his own 
in silence. I do not attach much importance to the disparage- 
ment of Wordsworth among London scholars. Who reads 
him well will know that in following the strong bent of his 
genius, he was careless of the many, careless also of the few, 
self-assured that he should " create the taste by which he is 
to be enjoyed." He lived long enough to witness the revolu- 



RESULT 485 

tion he had wrought, and " to see what he foresaw." There 
are torpid places in his mind, there is something hard and 
sterile in his poetry, want of grace and variety, want of due 
catholicity and cosmopolitan scope: he had conformities to 
English politics and traditions; he had egotistic puerilities 
in the choice and treatment of his subjects; but let us say of 
him that, alone in his time, he treated the human mind well, 
and with an absolute trust. His adherence to his poetic creed 
rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the 
high-water mark which the intellect has reached in this age. 
New means were employed, and new realms added to the 
empire of the muse, by his courage. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

RESULT 

England is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal frame- 
work, it is an old pile built in different ages, with repairs, 
additions, and makeshifts; but you see the poor best you have 
got. London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of 
to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed Teutons, they stand 
in solid phalanx foursquare to the points of compass; they 
constitute the modern world, they have earned their vantage- 
ground, and held it through ages of adverse possession. They 
are well marked and differing from other leading races. 
England is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not 
so public in its bias ; private life is its place of honor. Truth 
in private life, untruth in public, marks these home-loving 
men. Their political conduct is not decided by general views, 
but by internal intrigues and personal and family interest. 
They cannot readily see beyond England. The history of 
Rome and Greece, when written by their scholars, degener- 
ates into English party pamphlets. They cannot see beyond 
England, nor in England can they transcend the interests of 
the governing classes. " English principles " mean a pri- 
mary regard to the interests of property. England, Scot- 
land, and Ireland combine to check the colonies. England 
and Scotland combine to check Irish manufactures and trade. 

EE HCV 



486 ENGLISH TRAITS 

England rallies at home to check Scotland. In England, the 
strong classes check the weaker. In the home population of 
near thirty millions, there are but one million voters. The 
Church punishes dissent, punishes education. Down to a 
late day, marriages performed by dissenters were illegal. A 
bitter class-legislation gives power to those who are rich 
enough to buy a law. The game-laws are a proverb of op- 
pression. Pauperism incrusts and clogs the state, and in hard 
times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was 
diluted. Multitudes lived miserably by shell-fish and sea- 
ware. In cities, the children are trained to beg, until they 
shall be old enough to rob. Men and women were convicted 
of poisoning scores of children for burial-fees. In Irish 
districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, 
the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal 
form. During the Australian emigration, multitudes were 
rejected by the commissioners as being too emaciated for use- 
ful colonists. During the Russian war, few of those that 
offered as recruits were found up to the medical standard, 
though it had been reduced. 

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and lavish 
of money, has not often been generous or just. It has a 
principal regard to the interest of trade, checked however by 
the aristocratic bias of the ambassador, which usually puts 
him in sympathy with the continental Courts. It sanctioned 
the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parga, 
Greece, Turkey, Rome, and Hungary. 

Some public regards they have. They have abolished 
slavery in the West Indies, and put an end to human sacri- 
fices in the East. At home they have a certain statute hos- 
pitality. England keeps open doors, as a trading country 
must, to all nations. It is one of their fixed ideas, and wrath- 
fully supported by their laws in unbroken sequence for a 
thousand years. In Magna Charta it was ordained that all 
" merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out and 
come into England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by 
land as by water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed cus- 
toms, without any evil toll, except in time of war, or when 
they shall be of any nation at war with us." It is a statute 
and obliged hospitality, and peremptorily maintained. But 



RESULT 487 

this shop-rule had one magnificent effect. It extends its cold 
unalterable courtesy to political exiles of every opinion, and 
is a fact which might give additional light to that portion of 
the planet seen from the farthest star. But this perfunctory 
hospitality puts no sweetness into their unaccommodating 
manners, no check on that puissant nationality which makes 
their existence incompatible with all that is not English. 

What we must say about a nation is a superficial dealing 
with symptoms. We cannot go deep enough into the biog- 
raphy of the spirit who never throws himself entire into one 
hero, but delegates his energy in parts or spasms to vicious 
and defective individuals. But the wealth of the source is 
seen in the plenitude of English nature. What variety of 
power and talent ; what facility and plenteousness of knight- 
hood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a proud chiv- 
alry is indicated in " Collins's Peerage," through eight hun- 
dred years ! What dignity resting on what reality and stout- 
ness ! What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cun- 
ning workmen, what inventors and engineers, what seamen 
and pilots, what clerks and scholars ! No one man and no 
few men can represent them. It is a people of myriad per- 
sonalities. Their many-headedness is owing to the advan- 
tageous position of the middle class, who are always the 
source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of their 
aesthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are 
many-nationed : their colonization annexes archipelagoes and 
continents, and their speech seems destined to be the univer- 
sal language of men. I have noted the reserve of power in 
the English temperament. In the island, they never let out 
all the length of all the reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no 
abandonment or ecstasy of will or intellect, like that of the 
Arabs in the time of Mahomet, or like that which intoxi- 
cated France in 1789. But who would see the uncoiling of 
that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded 
forces, must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two 
hundred years from the British islands, have sailed, and 
rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates, mainly 
following the belt of empire, the temperate zones, carrying 
the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts 
and for thought, — acquiring under some skies a more electric 



488 ENGLISH TRAITS 

energy than the native air allows, — to the conquest of the 
globe. Their colonial policy, obeying the necessities of a vast 
empire, has become liberal. Canada and Australia have been 
contented with substantial independence. They are expiating 
the wrongs of India, by benefits ; first, in works for the irriga- 
tion of the peninsula, and roads and telegraphs ; and secondly, 
in the instruction of the people, to qualify them for self-gov- 
ernment, when the British power shall be finally called home. 

Their mind is in a state of arrested development, — a divine 
cripple like Vulcan ; a blind savant like Huber and Sanderson. 
They do not occupy themselves on matters of general and 
lasting import, but on a corporeal civilization, on goods that 
perish in the using. But they read with good intent, and what 
they learn they incarnate. The English mind turns every 
abstraction it can receive into a portable utensil, or a working 
institution. .Such is their tenacity, and such their practical 
turn, that they hold all they gain. Hence we say that only 
the English race can be trusted with freedom, — freedom 
which is double-edged and dangerous to any but the wise 
and robust. The English designate the kingdoms emulous 
of free institutions, as the sentimental nations. Their cul- 
ture is not an outside varnish, but is thorough and secular in 
families and the race. They are oppressive with their tem- 
perament, and all the more that they are refined. I have 
sometimes seen them walk with my countrymen when I was 
forced to allow them every advantage, and their companions 
seemed bags of bones. 

There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought, sleepy 
routine, and a tortoise's instinct to hold hard to the ground 
with his claws, lest he should be thrown on his back. There 
is a drag of inertia which resists reform in every shape; — 
law-reform, army-reform, extension of suffrage, Jewish fran- 
chise, Catholic emancipation, — the abolition of slavery, of 
impressment, penal code, and entails. They praise this drag, 
under the formula that it is the excellence of the British con- 
stitution, that no law can anticipate the public opinion. These 
poor tortoises must hold hard, for they feel no wings sprout- 
ing at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their 
heart, and waits a happier hour. It hides in their sturdy will. 
" Will," said the old philosophy, " is the measure of power," 



RESULT 4S 

and personality is the token of this race. Quid vult valde 
vult. What they do they do with a will. You cannot account 
for their success by their Christianity, commerce, charter, 
common law, Parliament, or letters, but by the contumacious 
sharp-tongued energy of English naturel, with a poise impos- 
sible to disturb, which makes all these its instruments. They 
are slow and reticent, and are like a dull good horse which 
lets every nag pass him, but with whip and spur will run 
down every racer in the field. They are right in their feel- 
ing, though wrong in their speculation. 

The feudal system survives in the steep inequality of prop- 
erty and privilege, in the limited franchise, in the social bar- 
riers which confine patronage and promotion to a caste, and 
still more in the submissive ideas pervading these people. 
The fagging of the schools is repeated in the social classes. 
An Englishman shows no mercy to those below him in the 
social scale, as he looks for none from those above him : any 
forbearance from his superiors surprises him, and they suffer 
in his good opinion. But the feudal system can be seen with 
less pain on large historical grounds. It was pleaded in miti- 
gation of the rotten borough, that it worked well, that sub- 
stantial justice was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilber- 
force, Sheridan, Romilly, or whatever national man, were by 
this means sent to Parliament, when their return by large 
constituencies would have been doubtful. So now we say 
that the right measures of England are the men it bred ; that 
it has yielded more able men in five hundred years than any 
other nation ; and, though we must not play Providence, and 
balance the chances of producing ten great men against 
the comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospectively 
we may strike the balance, and prefer one Alfred, one 
Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one Raleigh, one Well- 
ington, to a million foolish democrats. 

The American system is more democratic, more humane; 
yet the American people do not yield better or more able 
men, or more inventions or books or benefits, than the En- 
glish. Congress is not wiser or better than Parliament. 
France has abolished its suffocating old regime, but is not 
recently marked by any more wisdom or virtue. 

The power of performance has not been exceeded, — the 



.90 ENGLISH TRAITS 

creation of value. The English have given importance to 
individuals, a principal end and fruit of every society. Every 
man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and is 
guarded in the indulgence of his whim. " Magna Charta," 
said Rushworth, " is such a fellow that he will have no sov- 
ereign." By this general activity, and by this sacredness of 
individuals, they have in seven hundred years evolved the 
principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, 
sages, and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged 
should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island 
famous for immortal laws, for the announcements of original 
right which make the stone tables of liberty. 



CHAPTER XIX 

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER 

A few days after my arrival at Manchester, in November, 
1847, tne Manchester Athenaeum gave its annual Banquet in 
the Free-Trade Hall. With other guests, I was invited to be 
present, and to address the company. In looking over re- 
cently & newspaper-report of my remarks, I incline to reprint 
it, as fitly expressing the feeling with which I entered Eng- 
land, and which agrees well enough with the more deliberate 
results of better acquaintance recorded in the foregoing 
pages. Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, presided, and 
opened the meeting with a speech. He was followed by 
Mr. Cobden, Lord Brackley, and others, among whom was 
Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to " Punch." Mr. 
Dickens's letter of apology for his absence was read. Mr. 
Jerrold, who had been announced, did not appear. On being 
introduced to the meeting, I said : — 

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen : It is pleasant to me to meet 
this great and brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see 
the faces of so many distinguished persons on this platform. 
But I have known all these persons already. When I was 
at home, they were as near to me as they are to yo'u. The 
arguments of the League and its leader are known to all the 
friends of free trade. The gayeties and genius, the political, 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER 491 

the social, the parietal wit of " Punch " go duly eWry fort- 
night to every boy, and girl in Boston and New Yo^k. Sir, 
when I came to sea, I found the " History of Eurow m on 
the ship's cabin table, the property of the captain;— V a sor t * 
of programme or play-bill to tell the sea-faring New \Eng- 
lander what he shall find on his landing here. And a<\ for 
Dombey, sir, there is no land where paper exists to print on , 
where it is not found; no man who can read, that does i^ t 
read it, and, if he cannot, he finds some charitable pair c^f 
eyes than can, and hears it. \ 

But these things are not for me to say ; these compliments, \ 
though true, would better come from one who felt and under- \ 
stood these merits more. I am not here to exchange civili- \ 
ties with you, but rather to speak of that which I am sure 
interests these gentlemen more than their own praises; of 
that which is good in holidays and working-days, the same 
in one century and in another century. That which lures a 
solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England, \ 

is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race, — its commanding \ 

sense of right and wrong, — the love and devotion to that, — 
this is the imperial trait, which arms them with the sceptre of 
the globe. It is this which lies at the foundation of that 
aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into strange 
vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sigh of, but which, 
if it should lose this, would find itself paralyzed ; and in trade, 
and in the mechanic's shop, gives that honesty in perform- 
ance, that thoroughness and solidity of work, which is a 
national characteristic. This conscience is one element, and 
the other is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that 
homage of man to man, running through all classes, — the 
electing of worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of 
kindness and warm and stanch support, from year to year, 
from youth to age, — which is alike lovely and honorable to 
those who render and those who receive it; — which stands in 
strong contrast with the superficial attachments of other 
races, their excessive courtesy, and short-lived connection. 

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday 
though it be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday 
except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys; and I 

1 By Sir A. Alison. 



492 / ENGLISH TRAITS 

think it jjjfst, in this time of gloom and commercial disaster, 
of affliction and beggary in these districts, that, on these 
very accounts I speak of, you should not fail to keep your lit- 
erary anniversary. I seem to hear you say that, for all that 
is corne and gone yet, we will not reduce by one chaplet or 
one oak leaf the braveries of our annual feast. For I must 
tell you, I was given to understand in my childhood that the 
British island from which my forefathers came, was no 
lotus-garden, no paradise of serene sky and 'roses and music 
and merriment all the year round, no, but a cold foggy 
mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air, 
/ but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful 
/ fibre and endurance; that their best parts were slowly re- 
/ vealed; their virtues did not come out until they quarrelled: 
they did not strike twelve the first time; good lovers, good 
haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen 
them long, and little good of them till you had seen them in 
action ; that in prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but 
in adversity they were grand. Is it not true, sir, that the wise 
ancients did not praise the ship parting with flying colors 
from the port, but only that brave sailer which came back 
with torn sheets and battered sides, stript of her banners, but 
having ridden out the storm? And so, gentlemen, I feel in 
regard to this aged England, with the possessions, honors, 
and trophies, and also with the infirmities, of a thousand 
years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she 
now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly 
changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new 
and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and com- 
peting populations, — I see her not dispirited, not weak, but 
well remembering that she has seen dark days before; — in- 
deed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in 
a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity, .she 
has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in 
her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to be- 
lieve in her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, 
I say, All hail ! mother of nations, mother of heroes, with 
strength still equal to the time; still wise to entertain 
'and swift to execute the policy 'which the mind and 
heart of mankind requires in the present hour, and thus only 



SPEECH AT MANCHESTER 493 

hospitable to the foreigner, and truly a home to tl e thought- 
ful and generous who are born in the soil. So^ e "• so 
let it be ! If it be not so, if the courage of Engla 1 ^ & oes 
with the chances of a commercial crisis, I will go oack ° 
the capes of Massachusetts, and my own Indian streat 1 ' and 
say to my countrymen, the old race are all gone, an 1 the 
elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remai} on 
the Alleghany ranges, or nowhere. 









■tf 






